Pic. Credit can be found here.Born November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007. In the awesome location, Indianapolis, Indiana.
He's probably one of the writers who I adore more than any other. He was also adored by one of my favorite English Teachers in high school, I was in his class when I found out Kurt Vonnegut had died. We were saddened together and ended up talking about Slaughterhouse-Five during the class period.
He's an american novelist that blended satire, black comedy, and sci-fi. Known for his humanist beliefs and being honorary president of the American Humanist Association. He's considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century.
He graduated high school in May 1940, and then attended Cornell and served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for the student newspaper, Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in Chemistry. A member of the Delta Upsilon Frat, like his father. He enlisted in the U.S. Army while at Cornell and was transfered to the University of Tennessee.
In WWII he was a prisoner of war, which showed up in his later works. He was a private of the 106th infantry division and was captured 12.18.2944. While a POW he witnessed the fire bombing of dresden in Feb. 1945 which destroyed most of the city. He was in a group of prisoners that survived the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker, which the Germans called Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five), which the American POWs adopted as the name for their prison, where he was the leader because he could speak German. When he returned to the US he was awarded a purple heart.
He then attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in Anthropology and worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He was also a volunteer fire-fighter for a few years.
Vonnegut's first short story "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" appeared in the Feb. 11th, 1950 edition of Collier's. Which later appeared in his compilation Welcome to the Monkey House. Player Piano was his first novel, where most human workers were replaced by machines. Next came The Sirens of Titan - 1959.
In Breakfast of Champions he appeared as a deus ex machina:
"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.
"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.
"I know," I said.
Vonnegut's Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story:
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
"1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2.Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3.Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4.Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5.Start as close to the end as possible.
6.Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7.Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8.Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that."
The information found in this post is via Wikipedia.
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