Prisoner of war, volunteer fireman, Saab dealer, General Electric PR man, Mark Twain on Mars -- Kurt Vonnegut has been many things. As a novelist, he has been called many more: "impatient humanitarian," pessimist, mad scientist, optimist, "amiable Cassandra," culture hero, science-fiction writer. At his best, Vonnegut is a wizard, each novel a new Oz built to serve his larger purpose: to "catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and poison their minds with humanity." In Vonnegut's world, free will is an open question, life is poignant and pointless and kindness, even when it is a lie, is appreciated above all else. He has poisoned a lot of us over the years, but most of all, what distinguishes Vonnegut is that he makes the effort.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On Armistice Day, 1922, Kurt Vonnegut was born into a German-descended family of Indianapolis architects. He studied chemistry at Cornell, but pneumonia forced him to leave without his degree. He served as an infantryman in World War II, an experience that would sorely test his faith in science and shape his literary vision. At 22, Vonnegut withstood both the suicide of his mother and his own capture at the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in the German city of Dresden. Less than two months later, the Allied forces firebombed Dresden, an event around which Vonnegut would construct what is perhaps his best-known book, "Slaughterhouse-Five" -- named for the building that held him while the firestorm raged through the streets. It would take Vonnegut 25 years to come to literary terms with the bombing of Dresden. After World War II, he married Jane Cox, and studied briefly for a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He again left school without a degree, moving to Schenectady, N.Y., to work in public relations for General Electric. By 1950, Vonnegut had begun publishing short stories in magazines. On the advice of Knox Burger, the fiction editor of Collier's magazine, he left GE to pursue a career as a freelance writer. Though much of Vonnegut's work is an elaborate argument against the idea of luck, his timing was undeniably good. "In the Golden Age of Magazines, inexcusable trash was in such great demand that it led to the invention of the electric typewriter, and incidentally financed my escape from Schenectady," he once wrote.

In a series of short stories, Vonnegut began sketching out his vision of a fractured and warped world. But it was still just a sketch. His first novel, "Player Piano" (1952), was warmed-over Orwell and Huxley, and escaped notice. Then in 1958, Vonnegut's sister, Alice, died of cancer, just two days after her husband had died in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of Alice's three eldest children.

Seven years after the artless "Player Piano," Vonnegut seemed to find his voice -- that voice -- in 1959's "Sirens of Titan," a novel dense with riffs on military culture and free will. The opening lines:

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn't always so lucky.

Less than a century ago men and women did not have access to the puzzle boxes within them. They could not even name one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.

Gimcrack religions were big business.

"Sirens" weaves a tale that is goofy, but rivetingly told: After driving his spaceship into a cosmic phenomenon (and narrative gimmick) called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, an aristocrat named Winston Niles Rumfoord becomes no longer a man, but a "wave phenomenon" -- traveling in an orbit from the sun to a distant point in the constellation Betelgeuse, and appearing on Earth once every 59 days. Rumfoord gains godlike powers of telepathy. Because he can see the future, he foretells it for mankind. He taps an unlikely hero, Malachi Constant, to be the prophet of a new religion. After outlandish events that carry him to Mars and Mercury, Constant returns to Earth bearing a message of cosmic meaninglessness for the masses who have been told to expect him. The message is succinct, and very Vonnegut: "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." The novel was unique, but it did little to help Vonnegut ward off his first and most vexing label: science-fiction writer. Someone was missing his jokes. A decade later he would write, "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly because so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

Next page | "Citizen of nowhere at all"