60 Fun Facts About Kurt Vonnegut

In which city was Kurt Vonnegut born and raised?

His father and grandfather were architects there, and his mother's family fortune came from a brewery closed by Prohibition.

On what date was Vonnegut born?

Armistice Day, which he later noted; his protagonist Billy Pilgrim shares his birth year.

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

His great-grandfather Clemens founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company; the family firm designed Indianapolis's Athenaeum.

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

He said the compassionate, forgiving side of his beliefs came from her.

Which instrument did Vonnegut play in his high-school band?

At Shortridge High he also co-edited the Tuesday edition of the school paper with Madelyn Pugh, later a writer for I Love Lucy.

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

He wanted the humanities but was told to study something 'useful'; he was indifferent and ended up on academic probation.

In which German offensive of December 1944 was Vonnegut captured?

He was an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division and was taken on 22 December with about 50 other soldiers.

Where did Vonnegut shelter during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945?

'When we came up the city was gone,' he said; the prisoners were then set to digging bodies from the rubble.

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

He called Dresden the 'first fancy city' he had ever seen.

How did Vonnegut describe the Purple Heart he received?

After repatriation he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers.

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

His thesis ideas were all rejected; 25 years later the university accepted one of his novels in lieu of a thesis.

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.

For which company did Vonnegut work as a publicist in Schenectady before writing full time?

His brother Bernard worked there on silver-iodide cloud seeding, which fed into his fiction; he quit on 1 January 1951 and moved to Cape Cod.

How much did Collier's pay Vonnegut for his first published story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', in 1950?

The story concerned a scientist afraid his invention would become a weapon, echoing his brother's fears about cloud seeding.

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

Set in a company much like GE, it satirised automation; Bantam reissued it as Utopia 14, cementing his sci-fi label.

In his first novel, what question does the Shah of Bratpuhr put to the supercomputer EPICAC?

He gets no answer and dismisses the machine as a 'false god'; the outsider-visitor device recurs throughout Vonnegut's books.

What business did Vonnegut and a partner open on Cape Cod in 1957 that went bankrupt within the year?

He also designed a World War II board game called GHQ that no publisher would buy.

After his sister Alice died of cancer in 1958, what did Vonnegut and his wife do?

Her husband had been killed in a train accident two days earlier; the novel Slapstick later meditated on their sibling bond.

In The Sirens of Titan, how often does the time-warped Winston Niles Rumfoord materialise on Earth?

His ship entered a 'chrono-synclastic infundibulum'; the character was modelled physically on Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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

Human history has been manipulated by robotic aliens who need a replacement part only an advanced civilisation can make.

In Mother Night, what is Howard W. Campbell Jr.'s secret role while broadcasting Nazi propaganda?

After the war the agency refuses to clear him and he ends up in an Israeli cell block near Adolf Eichmann.

Which line did Vonnegut write in a foreword to Mother Night as its moral?

Critic Lawrence Berkove compared its impersonator carried away by his role to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

In which year is the short story 'Harrison Bergeron' set?

Constitutional amendments have made everyone equal, so the beautiful wear masks and the clever wear radios that scramble their thoughts.

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

Diana Moon Glampers holds the post; Vonnegut reused her name for a character in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

On which fictional Caribbean island does the second half of his 1963 atomic-bomb novel unfold?

There the narrator discovers Bokononism, a religion built on harmless untruths, or 'foma'.

What is 'ice-nine' in the same 1963 novel?

Its inventor Felix Hoenikker was modelled on Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut's boss at GE.

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.

How does Eliot Rosewater, the rich senator's son in the 1964 novel, atone for a wartime killing?

The character was based on an accountant Vonnegut knew on Cape Cod who specialised in clients in trouble.

Which teaching post in the mid-1960s did Vonnegut liken to 'the rescue of a drowning man'?

He was broke and out of print; a Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1967 and took him back to Dresden.

What is the full title of the 1969 novel that made Vonnegut famous?

He promised Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife, that he would call it The Children's Crusade and not glorify the 'babies' who fought.

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

He marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns the Ilium School of Optometry.

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

They keep him in a zoo dome with film star Montana Wildhack; the same planet's robots appear in The Sirens of Titan.

For what crime is Billy's friend Edgar Derby executed in the ashes of Dresden?

The novel discloses this, Billy's 1976 death and his abduction all in its opening pages.

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

The line signals an unreliable narrator; the book's non-linear structure mirrors Billy's mind.

Which real author's name inspired the recurring character Kilgore Trout?

Vonnegut liked the idea of a man named after a fish, so swapped one fish for another; the two were neighbours on Cape Cod.

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

Philip José Farmer later published Venus on the Half-Shell in 1975 under Trout's name as an homage.

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

His encounter with Kilgore Trout tips him into insanity; the novel is subtitled Goodbye Blue Monday.

In Slapstick, how does Wilbur Swain's plan give every American an artificial extended family?

Everyone with the same name becomes a cousin, and same name and number makes siblings; the book is subtitled Lonesome No More!.

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

Starbuck has just left a minimum-security prison in Georgia and reflects on the American labour movement.

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

He first appeared as a minor character in Breakfast of Champions; the plot loosely echoes Perrault's fairy tale.

What grim symmetry does Hocus Pocus narrator Eugene Debs Hartke discover about his life?

His name honours two Indiana figures, labour leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke.

In Timequake, to which year are the citizens of 2001 flung back to relive every action?

Vonnegut called the book a 'stew' and had Kilgore Trout die in 2001 at a fictional Xanadu retreat in Rhode Island.

How many novels did Vonnegut publish in his lifetime?

Plus three story collections, five plays and five nonfiction books; the last novel was Timequake in 1997.

How many short stories are collected in Welcome to the Monkey House?

Published by Delacorte in August 1968, it ranges from wartime tales to the title story from Playboy.

Who directed the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes?

Vonnegut called it 'a flawless translation' and said he drooled and cackled every time he watched it.

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

Two years earlier he had attempted suicide during a long struggle with depression.

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

He had smoked them since he was around 12 or 14 and was 83 at the time.

How did Vonnegut die in April 2007?

He was 84; his son Mark published the collection Armageddon in Retrospect the following year.

In which Supreme Court case was a New York school board's removal of his best-known novel ruled unconstitutional?

The board had called the book 'anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy'.

Which post did the atheist Vonnegut hold with the American Humanist Association?

He described himself as a 'Christ-worshipping agnostic' who admired the Sermon on the Mount.

Which celestial body is named 25399 Vonnegut in his honour?

A crater on Mercury also carries his name, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2015.

Which future I Love Lucy writer co-edited the Shortridge Echo school newspaper with Vonnegut?

He said the Echo taught him to write for a real audience, his fellow students, rather than a teacher.

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

By the end of his first year he was writing a column called 'Innocents Abroad'.

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

He discovered it while home on Mother's Day leave, three months before shipping out to Europe.

Vonnegut served in Europe as an intelligence scout with which US Army division?

The division was hit hard in the Ardennes, where he was taken prisoner in December 1944.

Vonnegut's brother Bernard worked at GE on a cloud-seeding project using which chemical?

The work became Project Cirrus, a joint GE–Army Signal Corps programme; Bernard's boss inspired Cat's Cradle's Felix Hoenikker.

In which Cape Cod town did Vonnegut settle after leaving GE to write full time?

He first tried Osterville before buying the Barnstable house in the early 1950s.

Which two early Vonnegut novels were nominated for the Hugo Award?

Both sold modestly at first; real fame waited until Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

After teaching at Iowa, Vonnegut won a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research in which country?

The trip back to Dresden fed directly into Slaughterhouse-Five.

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

They met while she was shooting a series about writers; together they adopted a three-day-old daughter, Lily.