Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922–2007) was an American novelist and essayist whose work, including Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the best-selling Breakfast of Champions, blends satire, gallows humor, and science fiction in a fantastic vision of everyday life. His chaotic fictional universe was perhaps influenced by the tragic events in his life, which he viewed as random—his mother’s suicide on Mother’s Day, his surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, his sister Alice’s death from cancer two days after her husband’s death in a train crash. Vonnegut raised seven children, and married twice.