Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

This collection includes the letter the twenty-two-year old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from the German POW camp; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer; a letter to the CEO of Eagle Shirtmakers with a crackpot scheme to manufacture “atomic” bow ties; angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; letters to his children including advice like ‘Don’t let anybody tell you that smoking and boozing are bad for you. Here I am fifty-five years old, and I never felt better in my life’; fantastically wise letters to writers such as Norman Mailer, Gunter Grass, and Bernard Malamud; and his characteristically modest response to being called a ‘great literary figure’: ‘I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.’

Like Vonnegut’s books, his letters make you think, they make you outraged and they make you laugh. Written over a sixty-year period, and never published before, these letters are alive with the unique point of view that made Vonnegut one of the most original writers in American fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. During the Second World War he served in Europe and, as a prisoner of was in Germany, witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Dan Wakefield first befriended Kurt Vonnegut in 1963. Like Vonnegut, he was born and raised in Indianapolis. He is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include the bestselling Going All the Way and the memoir New York in the Fifties.