56 Fun Facts About Kurt Vonnegut

In which city was Kurt Vonnegut born and raised?

Indianapolis: his mother's family had grown rich there from a brewery, until Prohibition shut it down.

Vonnegut was born 11 November 1922, four years after what?

The WWI armistice: he went on to fight in the next world war, and was captured by the Germans.

What was the profession of Vonnegut's father and grandfather?

Architects: when the Great Depression hit, building work dried up and his father was left without work for much of the 1930s.

Whom did Vonnegut credit with raising him and giving him his values during his first decade?

Ida Young, the family cook: he said the compassionate, forgiving side of his beliefs came from her.

Which 1997 newspaper column went viral as a commencement speech by Vonnegut, though he never gave it?

Wear Sunscreen: Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich wrote it, and Baz Luhrmann turned it into a hit spoken-word song.

What did Vonnegut major in at college, at the urging of his father and brother?

Biochemistry, though he had little interest in it; failing his classes, he dropped out in 1943 and enlisted rather than wait to be drafted.

In which battle was Kurt Vonnegut taken prisoner by the Germans?

The Battle of the Bulge; on the way to a Dresden labour camp, British planes mistakenly bombed the train carrying him and other prisoners.

Where did Vonnegut shelter during the firebombing of Dresden?

A meat locker three storeys underground, cool, with carcasses hanging all around; when the prisoners came up, the city was gone.

What did the factory where Vonnegut worked as a prisoner in Dresden produce?

Malt syrup for pregnant women; he slept in a slaughterhouse, and that building gave his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, its title.

After the firebombing of Dresden, what work were Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners forced to do?

Recovering bodies from the ruins; the prisoners dug out the dead and carried them to mass funeral pyres.

What subject did Vonnegut study at the University of Chicago after the war?

Anthropology; he finished the coursework, but every thesis idea he proposed was rejected, and he left Chicago without a master's degree.

Which of his novels did the University of Chicago eventually accept in place of a master's thesis?

One of his rejected thesis topics had been about the shapes of stories, an idea he later turned into a famous lecture.

Which phrase follows each death in Slaughterhouse-Five?

So it goes; he borrows it from aliens who see all of time at once, so to them the dead are only dead in that particular moment.

Which weekly magazine published Vonnegut's first story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', in 1950?

Collier's, whose fiction editor Knox Burger coached him; encouraged by his early sales, he quit GE in 1951 to write full time.

What was the title of Vonnegut's first novel, published in 1952?

Player Piano; Bantam reissued it in 1954 as Utopia 14, and the science-fiction label clung to him.

In Vonnegut's first novel, what does engineer Paul Proteus end up leading?

A revolt against the machines; his rebels smash the automated factories, but the uprising fails.

Which carmaker's cars did Vonnegut sell at his short-lived 1950s dealership?

Saab; with his next novel taking years to write, he ran the dealership in 1957 to help support his family.

After his sister Alice died of cancer, what did Vonnegut and his wife do?

Took in three of her young sons; their father had been killed in a commuter-train crash two days before she died, and the household doubled overnight.

According to The Sirens of Titan, what is the Kremlin really?

A coded message to a stranded alien ship; in the novel, all of human history has been steered to make one spare part for that ship.

In Mother Night, whom does Nazi propagandist Howard W. Campbell Jr. secretly spy for?

US intelligence; hidden inside his Nazi propaganda broadcasts was information meant for the Americans.

In Mother Night, what does Howard W. Campbell Jr. resolve to do once proof that could clear him arrives?

Hang himself, even though the letter proving his wartime spying could win his case at trial.

What is the title of the official who shoots Harrison Bergeron dead on live television?

Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers bursts in with a shotgun, kills Harrison and the ballerina, and orders the musicians to put their handicaps back on.

On which fictional Caribbean island does much of Vonnegut's 1963 atomic-bomb novel unfold?

San Lorenzo, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the narrator ends up living through the apocalypse.

What is 'ice-nine' in Vonnegut's fiction?

Ice that freezes all water it touches; once a speck of it reaches the sea, the oceans freeze and the apocalypse follows.

On whom did Vonnegut base Felix Hoenikker, the fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb?

Langmuir was the Nobel-winning head of the GE Research Lab where Bernard Vonnegut worked.

What did Vonnegut scatter through the pages of Breakfast of Champions?

His own drawings; some critics panned it, yet it spent 56 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Where did Vonnegut teach writing in the mid-1960s, just before Slaughterhouse-Five made him famous?

The Iowa Writers' Workshop; from there a Guggenheim Fellowship sent him to Germany to research the book that became Slaughterhouse-Five.

Which medieval episode did Vonnegut name in the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five?

The Children's Crusade; he had promised it to Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife, who feared that books made war look glamorous.

What is the profession of Slaughterhouse-Five's protagonist Billy Pilgrim after the war?

Optometrist; he marries the daughter of the owner of the Ilium School of Optometry, and with his father-in-law's help he grows rich.

From which planet do the aliens who abduct Billy Pilgrim come?

Tralfamadore; its aliens see all of time at once and keep him in a zoo, inside a transparent dome furnished like a house.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, what crime gets Edgar Derby executed in the ashes of Dresden?

Stealing a teapot; after tens of thousands died in the firebombing, the Germans shot one American for taking a teapot from the ruins.

With what words does Slaughterhouse-Five's first chapter begin?

'All this happened, more or less.' The first chapter is Vonnegut himself, admitting how hard the book was to write.

In which Vonnegut novel did Kilgore Trout make his first appearance?

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; a decade later Philip José Farmer published a real novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, under Trout's name.

What does Dwayne Hoover, co-protagonist of Breakfast of Champions, sell in Midland City?

Pontiacs; after reading a Kilgore Trout novel that says everyone else is a robot, he goes on a violent rampage.

In Slapstick, how does Wilbur Swain give every American an extended family?

New shared middle names; everyone who shares a name becomes a cousin, and the scheme still binds survivors together as civilisation collapses.

Jailbird, narrated by Walter F. Starbuck, is often described as Vonnegut's novel about which scandal?

Watergate; newly released, Starbuck discovers that his old flame is secretly the owner of the giant RAMJAC Corporation.

What is the profession of Rabo Karabekian, narrator of Bluebeard?

Abstract Expressionist painter; the book is his fictional autobiography, and its Bluebeard-like secret is whatever he keeps locked in his potato barn.

In Hocus Pocus, what does fired college professor Eugene Debs Hartke eventually become?

A prison warden; escaped inmates seize his old college, it becomes the prison he runs, and he later ends up an inmate there himself.

In Timequake, what must people do after being flung back to 1991?

Repeat every action, with no free will, so everyone must watch themselves make the same bad choices all over again.

While a student in Chicago after the war, what did Vonnegut do on the side?

Police reporter; he credited newspaper work with teaching him to write plainly for a wide audience.

Who directed the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five?

George Roy Hill; Vonnegut raved about the result, calling it a flawless translation of his novel to the screen.

In which 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy did Vonnegut appear as himself?

Back to School; Dangerfield's millionaire student gets others to do his schoolwork, including Vonnegut, hired to write a paper on Vonnegut.

Which brand of cigarettes did Vonnegut joke about suing in 2006, because the pack 'promised to kill me'?

Pall Mall, which he chain-smoked from his early teens; his joke was that the maker had lied, since he was still alive at 83.

How did Vonnegut die in April 2007?

Brain injuries from a fall at home; he fell at his New York brownstone weeks earlier, not from the cigarettes he had joked would kill him.

In which 1982 Supreme Court case did students challenge a school board that pulled Slaughterhouse-Five from libraries?

Island Trees v. Pico; the justices split, but the principal opinion said boards may not remove books just to suppress ideas they dislike.

Which post did Vonnegut hold with the American Humanist Association?

Honorary president, after Isaac Asimov; he said his German-American ancestors, who called themselves Freethinkers, held much the same beliefs.

Which celestial body is named 25399 Vonnegut in his honour?

An asteroid; the IAU later named a crater on Mercury for him too, since Mercury's craters honour artists and authors.

In Vonnegut's Galápagos, what does the narrator blame for all the world's sorrows?

The oversized human brain; over a million years, natural selection shrinks it, because a smaller, streamlined head swims better.

As an undergraduate, Vonnegut wrote for and edited which student newspaper?

The Cornell Daily Sun; more interested in the paper than in his major, he soon began failing his classes.

How did Vonnegut's mother Edith die in May 1944?

An overdose of sleeping pills; he found out when he came home on leave for Mother's Day weekend, months before he shipped out to Europe.

In Vonnegut's invented religion Bokononism, what is a 'granfalloon'?

A group with nothing real in common; Vonnegut later reused the word for his 1974 essay collection, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.

What did Vonnegut's brother Bernard discover could seed clouds to make rain or snow?

Silver iodide; decades later Bernard also won an Ig Nobel Prize for gauging tornado wind speeds by how thoroughly they plucked chickens.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, on what occasion do aliens abduct Billy Pilgrim?

His daughter's wedding night; only after surviving a plane crash does he go on a New York talk show to describe it.

At which stage of school did Vonnegut first meet his first wife, Jane Marie Cox?

Kindergarten; they married soon after he came home from the war, and she edited his early stories.

Which mock religion does Vonnegut invent in The Sirens of Titan?

The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, which Rumfoord founds on Earth after a Martian invasion he had designed to fail.

What was the profession of Jill Krementz, whom Vonnegut married in 1979?

Photographer; in 1982 the couple adopted a baby daughter, Lily, and they stayed married until his death.