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Kurt Vonnegut Biography

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Kurt Vonnegut Biography Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Born in Indianapolis. Attended Cornell University, majoring in chemistry. Served in WWII and was POW in Dresden when 135,000 were killed by fire bombs. His mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day 1944. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Attended University of Chicago as graduate student in anthropology, but his thesis was rejected. In 1971 Chicago awarded him the MA, accepting his novel Cat’s Cradle as substitute for his thesis. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) After WWII he married his childhood sweetheart Jane Cox and eventually raised seven children, three with her, three adopted after his sister Alice died and one adopted with his second wife Jill Krementz. Worked in public relations for General Electric. Quit in 1950 to write science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Player Piano (1952) was his first novel, followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Mother Night (1961). Cat’s Cradle (1963) was his first book to be published in hard back, followed by God Bless You Mr. Rosewater (1965) Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Considered giving up writing but took a position teaching at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop where he started writing Slaughter House Five (1969) which became his first big best seller. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Other novels included Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), and Timequake (1997). Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) He smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes all of his adult life, calling it a “classy way to commit suicide.” In TimeQuake (1997) he wrote that his alter ego Kilgore Trout would die when he was 84. Ten years later, Vonnegut died at the age of 84 after a fall in his home. .
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    Tutton Parker 1 What’s in the Potato Barn: A Discourse of Redemption in Three of Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of the College of Arts and Science in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts and English By Rebecca Tutton Parker April 2018 Tutton Parker 2 Liberty University College of Arts and Sciences Master of Arts in English Student Name: Rebecca Tutton Parker Thesis Chair Date First Reader Date Second Reader Date Tutton Parker 3 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction………………………………………………………………………...4 Chapter Two: Redemption in Slaughterhouse-Five and Bluebeard…………………………..…23 Chapter Three: Rabo Karabekian’s Path to Redemption in Breakfast of Champions…………...42 Chapter Four: How Rabo Karabekian Brings Redemption to Kurt Vonnegut…………………..54 Chapter Five: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..72 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..75 Tutton Parker 4 Chapter One: Introduction The Bluebeard folktale has been recorded since the seventeenth century with historical roots even further back in history. What is most commonly referred to as Bluebeard, however, started as a Mother Goose tale transcribed by Charles Perrault in 1697. The story is about a man with a blue beard who had many wives and told them not to go into a certain room of his castle (Hermansson ix). Inevitably when each wife was given the golden key to the room and a chance alone in the house, she would always open the door and find the dead bodies of past wives. She would then meet her own death at the hands of her husband. According to Casie Hermansson, the tale was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which spurred many literary figures to adapt it, including James Boswell, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Thomas Carlyle (x).
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