April 12, 2007 Kurt , Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 By DINITIA SMITH

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack1 on Long Island.

His death was reported by his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz2, who said he had been hospitalized after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,”3 “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of science fiction, philosophy and jokes, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment4.

His novels — 14 in all5 — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the

1 “We were neighbors out at Sagaponack, on Long Island.” Vonnegut describing how he used to meet with Truman Capote towards the end of his life. – The Salon Interview: 2 Married Jill Krementz (a photographer), November, 1979 – Contemporary Authors Online, from Literature Resource Center 3 Essay collections Fates Worse Than Death (1991) – Biography in Context 4 “He blended literature with science fiction and humor, the absurd with pointed social commentary.” – Biography.com profile 5 Complete list of works, including 14 novels – Contemporary Literary Criticism, from Literature Resource Center universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism6 (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war7. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five8, or The Children’s Crusade,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel9, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography in a vernacular voice, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

6 Cat’s Cradle summary, “All of San Lorenzo's residents were practitioners of Bokononism, a religion created by Bokonon.” – SparkNotes.com, Wikipedia entry on “Bokononism” details use of word in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. 7 “Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Interned as a prisoner of war at Dresden, he was one of the few survivors of that city's firestorm destruction” – Gale’s Biography in Context 8 Slaughterhouse-Five inspired by Dresden bombing – The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, v.4 9 “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater or, Pearls Before Swine by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Holt, Rinehard & Winston, $4.95). Humorous novel about a young eccentric philanthropist.” Dated April 5, 1965 – Books Today from the New York Times, retrieved from ProQuest He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 192210, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family11. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms12.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University13, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

10 Born: November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States – Biography in Context 11 “…the third child of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. (an architect in practice with the family firm) and Edith Lieber (the daughter of a prominent brewer and patron of the arts) – The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, v.4 12 “Thanks to his brother Bernard, by now an internationally prominent atmospheric physicist…” – The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, v. 4 13 “After Shortridge, Vonnegut went to Cornell in 1941…” – American Writers

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company14. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.

His first novel was “,” published in 195215. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as

14 “…pub. relations with General Electric Co., 1947-50” - Marquis Who’s Who of Vonnegut 15 “His first novel, Player Piano (1952), is a highly credible account of a future mechanistic society in which people count for little and machines for much.” – Bowker’s Books in Print Professional paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte16.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.17

“Slaughterhouse-Five” provided another stage for his fictional alter ego, , a recurring character introduced in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.”18 The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”19

16 Mother Night, Release Date: 1 November 1996 (USA). Starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee and Alan Arkin with a cameo by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – IMDb.com 17 “…hiding in the basement of an abandoned meat slaughterhouse with his fellow prisoners while firebombs destroyed the beautiful city above and killed thousands of people.” – Moss, J. & Wilson, G., Literature Resource Center, Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. 18 “First encountered in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Trout reappears in later novels.” – American Writers 19 As quoted in Wikiquotes, under Slaughterhouse-Five One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No. 1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.20

“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 197021 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with Ms. Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973)22, calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Studge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot. In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s23. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

20 “Vonnegut struggled with silence and depression — including a suicide attempt in 1984” – Time Magazine obituary, L. Grossman. 21 “He released a short-running play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)” – Literature Online 22 Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. – Selected Bibliography, American Writers 23 “A timequake throws the universe backwards and everyone has to relive the years 1991 to 2001”, published 1997. – NYPL OPAC Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time24. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”25

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “.” It, too, was a best seller.

It concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.26

24 Retrieved Time review by R.Z. Sheppard, 12/06/10 25 Retrieved New York Times review by Valerie Sayers, 12/06/10 26 Checked with A Man Without a Country at NYPL, Mid-Manhattan branch. Methodology:

Oddly enough, I felt that I used a lot more print sources than I normally would in research (despite the requirement of needing to use them). I didn’t even use Google once!

I began with NYPL’s OPAC, because I thought I would be able to find some author biographies at least in Schwarzman. I found one, the Oxford Encyclopedia of American

Literature, volume 4 by searching for American author biographies. It is arranged alphabetically over four volumes, so Kurt Vonnegut was in the final one. Since it was in the reference section, I knew there would be similar sources nearby that could be useful. I went to Schwarzman and located the encyclopedia. Near it I found American Writers, which I actually located again later in the Biography & Genealogy Master Index (BGMI).

I went to that index later to look for literature that was often cited, and found American

Writers. There were around 330 citations in all on BGMI, and most were in other indexes, like Biography Index. Another highly cited work was Notable American

Novelists, which was listed at Mid-Manhattan on NYPL’s catalog, but I was unable to locate it when I went there. Not all the works listed on BGMI were at NYPL, so I went in search of information elsewhere. Another print source I used was Vonnegut’s own A Man

Without a Country. The obituary ends with a direct quote lifted from the book, so I just checked to see if the quote was correct. I tried looking in American National Biography, the print version, for a section on Vonnegut. Oddly enough, he was not listed in any of the volumes. I tried the American National Biography Online source and he was not listed in there as well. I found this surprising, mainly because I loved it and used it for the previous assignment on locating Nobel Prize winners and German-American architects.

Another print source I consulted was the Almanac of Famous People. The entries are so condensed and bare, that it borders on uselessness. It lists its references, which is probably the only useful thing about it if one needs to do research. It does index entries by years, dates of birth, birthplace, and occupation.

NYPL has a lot of online literature resources, namely biographical. I used Gale’s

Biography in Context, which proved to have more information about Vonnegut than the last time I looked for information on the site. The biography is lengthy. A bibliography of his work and basic facts (birth, education, family, career honors, other work) is listed. A proprietary biographical resource I used was Marquis Who’s Who on the Web. This was good for basic facts (something I already knew), but nothing if I wanted to research into an individual’s life. The bibliography is useful, in addition to seeing what honors the person has received and their resume. Also, it is very easy to use. Another proprietary source I used was the Literature Resource Center. I enjoyed this one a lot, because it had a solid amount of different types of information. By this I mean it was a biography, bibliography, index and directory all in one form. I could search “by or about a person”, the name of the work, or a keyword. When I searched for Vonnegut, I got results in criticism, biographies, overviews (mainly study guides for students), reviews/news, and his literary works. The reviews and news section is useful, since it compiles listings from

Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and others. Many are recent works, but it did have listings dating back to 1990. Luckily it was all full text, so when I searched the

Contemporary Literary Criticism and Contemporary Authors Online, I could view full articles and biographies from different sources. Literature Online, NYPL’s on-site biography and bibliography service was also impressive; the biography was extensive.

There was a lot of results for criticism and reference for Vonnegut as well. It was nice that some where in full text. One way this resource could be improved is to be able to filter the results to only full text. It seemed to be randomly organized and it was annoying to flip through all the pages in order to find information that I can actually access without having to run around to different places to get a copy of a journal or book. One can search by author, text and in criticism. There are also full text journals available for browsing. For Vonnegut, I found information in biography form, criticism of his work, a bibliography, reference articles on his work (like student guides), and relevant web sites, like his site and the Salon Magazine interview used for fact-checking. I also liked using

ProQuest’s New York Times historical newspapers database. I could search and browse by subject, people, and company names from 1851-2007 (on this particular index; there is another with more recent articles but I did not find it necessary to use since Vonnegut died in 2007). I liked that I was able to view the actual document. It is extremely useful to search in date ranges, in the actual text of the document, author and document type (like obituaries, reviews, marriages and lottery numbers!). ProQuest also has records for other important newspapers, which is something to keep in mind for the future. Bowker’s

Books in Print Professional is an average resource for me. I tried searching for

Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and it took awhile since there were too many results. I couldn’t even find a listing for the original publication, only for reprinting. I eventually found a note on the original publication date on the listing for an updated version. It serves its job it is meant to do, but the searches I did gave too many strange results that weren’t relevant to what I wanted.

Four non-scholarly resources I used were Sparknotes, Wikiquotes, Internet Movie

Database, and Wikipedia. I have used all four extensively, so they were easy to navigate and I knew what I was looking for. Wikiquotes is set up so his quotes are separated by work, which makes it easy to locate the specific quote I checked. While IMDb has changed its format to a less user-friendly one recently, I can still use it easily to find

Mother Night. Sparknotes is actually easier to use and better set up than when I used it in high school. There is a great summary that I used, in addition to chapter summaries, analyses, and historical context if applicable. Biography.com was another source that I already knew about and only consulted briefly to check one fact. Their biography of

Vonnegut is solid, but it is not as extensive as the ones in the Oxford Encyclopedia or

American Writers, among others. These five sources were already embedded in my brain from so much use that I did not even need to think about using other resources besides those in NYPL or on IPL.

I used IPL’s directory search to see if I could find any information on Vonnegut.

There were none on authors, so I used more general ones, like the Best of the Web directory and Virtual Learning Resources Center (VLRC). Best of the Web has a collection of quotes, his own website, and a few other random bits of information that was not really useful for me. I did find the Time Magazine obituary through this directory though, so in the end it was slightly useful. There is not a whole lot of information that seems to be organized in here, so I wouldn’t put much stock into it. It is easy to use though, even though the design is a little messy. VLRC was similarly not the best directory, at least for my particular subject. The information is divided much like IPL’s subject collections. There is a wide range of subjects, however. I found sections called

“American Authors” and “American Authors on the Web”. Vonnegut was not listed on

“American Authors” (even though there were lesser known writers listed), and there was not a lot of information on the “American Authors on the Web” for Vonnegut. In fact, many of the links to other websites had died.

I found this assignment to be more enjoyable than the previous ones; I believe this is because I have already used many sources that are applicable to fact-checking a biography. The biographical sources were easy to come by, in addition to the encyclopedias, indexes, directories, and bibliographies. I already knew the types of sources to look for (e.g. Biography in Context, Bowker’s Books in Print, NYPL’s literature resources, etc.). I found what type of sources seemed to work best for me. I enjoyed using print, only because it is easier for me personally to go to a reference collection and grab all the relevant books at once. The online sources I consulted were pretty invaluable in their own ways, from easy access and searching capability.

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Biography in Context, Thomas Gale, 2010. (Accessed electronically through NYPL,

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Bokononism. (n.d.). In Wikipedia.org. Retrieved from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism

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_.281965.29