Kurt Vonnegut Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
56 free Kurt Vonnegut trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Kurt Vonnegut trivia quiz covers the life and books of the American satirist who survived the firebombing of Dresden in a meat locker and turned it, twenty-four years later, into Slaughterhouse-Five. It starts with his Indianapolis family of architects and brewers, his clarinet-playing school days, the biochemistry degree he never finished at Cornell and his capture during the Battle of the Bulge. It follows him through General Electric, a bankrupt Saab dealership, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the fame that arrived in 1969. The bulk of the questions are about the novels and stories themselves: Player Piano and the Shah of Bratpuhr, the chrono-synclastic infundibulum of The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night's double agent, Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General, ice-nine and Bokononism, Eliot Rosewater, Billy Pilgrim and Tralfamadore, Dwayne Hoover and Midland City, Slapstick's artificial extended families, Jailbird, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus and Timequake, plus Kilgore Trout, the fish-named alter ego who wanders through so many of them. The 1972 film, the Supreme Court book-ban case, the asteroid and the museum round it off. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on Vonnegut and his individual works, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for book clubs, English students and anyone who has ever written 'so it goes' in a margin.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Kurt Vonnegut born and raised?
Indianapolis
Indianapolis: his mother's family had grown rich there from a brewery, until Prohibition shut it down.
Q 02Vonnegut was born 11 November 1922, four years after what?
The WWI armistice
The WWI armistice: he went on to fight in the next world war, and was captured by the Germans.
Q 03What was the profession of Vonnegut's father and grandfather?
Architects
Architects: when the Great Depression hit, building work dried up and his father was left without work for much of the 1930s.
Q 04Whom did Vonnegut credit with raising him and giving him his values during his first decade?
Ida Young, the family cook
Ida Young, the family cook: he said the compassionate, forgiving side of his beliefs came from her.
Q 05Which 1997 newspaper column went viral as a commencement speech by Vonnegut, though he never gave it?
Wear Sunscreen
Wear Sunscreen: Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich wrote it, and Baz Luhrmann turned it into a hit spoken-word song.
Q 06What did Vonnegut major in at college, at the urging of his father and brother?
Biochemistry
Biochemistry, though he had little interest in it; failing his classes, he dropped out in 1943 and enlisted rather than wait to be drafted.
Q 07In which battle was Kurt Vonnegut taken prisoner by the Germans?
The Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge; on the way to a Dresden labour camp, British planes mistakenly bombed the train carrying him and other prisoners.
Q 08Where did Vonnegut shelter during the firebombing of Dresden?
A meat locker three storeys underground
A meat locker three storeys underground, cool, with carcasses hanging all around; when the prisoners came up, the city was gone.
Q 09What did the factory where Vonnegut worked as a prisoner in Dresden produce?
Malt syrup for pregnant women
Malt syrup for pregnant women; he slept in a slaughterhouse, and that building gave his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, its title.
Q 10After the firebombing of Dresden, what work were Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners forced to do?
Recovering bodies from the ruins
Recovering bodies from the ruins; the prisoners dug out the dead and carried them to mass funeral pyres.
Q 11What subject did Vonnegut study at the University of Chicago after the war?
Anthropology
Anthropology; he finished the coursework, but every thesis idea he proposed was rejected, and he left Chicago without a master's degree.
Q 12Which of his novels did the University of Chicago eventually accept in place of a master's thesis?
Cat's Cradle
One of his rejected thesis topics had been about the shapes of stories, an idea he later turned into a famous lecture.
Q 13Which phrase follows each death in Slaughterhouse-Five?
So it goes
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.
Q 21In Mother Night, what does Howard W. Campbell Jr. resolve to do once proof that could clear him arrives?
Hang himself
Hang himself, even though the letter proving his wartime spying could win his case at trial.
Q 22What is the title of the official who shoots Harrison Bergeron dead on live television?
Handicapper General
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.
Q 23On which fictional Caribbean island does much of Vonnegut's 1963 atomic-bomb novel unfold?
San Lorenzo
Q 14Which weekly magazine published Vonnegut's first story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', in 1950?
Collier's
Collier's, whose fiction editor Knox Burger coached him; encouraged by his early sales, he quit GE in 1951 to write full time.
Q 15What was the title of Vonnegut's first novel, published in 1952?
Player Piano
Player Piano; Bantam reissued it in 1954 as Utopia 14, and the science-fiction label clung to him.
Q 16In Vonnegut's first novel, what does engineer Paul Proteus end up leading?
A revolt against the machines
A revolt against the machines; his rebels smash the automated factories, but the uprising fails.
Q 17Which carmaker's cars did Vonnegut sell at his short-lived 1950s dealership?
Saab
Saab; with his next novel taking years to write, he ran the dealership in 1957 to help support his family.
Q 18After his sister Alice died of cancer, what did Vonnegut and his wife do?
Took in three of her young sons
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.
Q 19According to The Sirens of Titan, what is the Kremlin really?
A coded message to a stranded alien ship
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.
Q 20In Mother Night, whom does Nazi propagandist Howard W. Campbell Jr. secretly spy for?
US intelligence
US intelligence; hidden inside his Nazi propaganda broadcasts was information meant for the Americans.
San Lorenzo, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the narrator ends up living through the apocalypse.
Q 24What is 'ice-nine' in Vonnegut's fiction?
Ice that freezes all water it touches
Ice that freezes all water it touches; once a speck of it reaches the sea, the oceans freeze and the apocalypse follows.
Q 25On whom did Vonnegut base Felix Hoenikker, the fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb?
Irving Langmuir
Langmuir was the Nobel-winning head of the GE Research Lab where Bernard Vonnegut worked.
Q 26What did Vonnegut scatter through the pages of Breakfast of Champions?
His own drawings
His own drawings; some critics panned it, yet it spent 56 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Q 27Where did Vonnegut teach writing in the mid-1960s, just before Slaughterhouse-Five made him famous?
The Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop; from there a Guggenheim Fellowship sent him to Germany to research the book that became Slaughterhouse-Five.
Q 28Which medieval episode did Vonnegut name in the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five?
The Children's Crusade
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.
Q 29What is the profession of Slaughterhouse-Five's protagonist Billy Pilgrim after the war?
Optometrist
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.
Q 30From which planet do the aliens who abduct Billy Pilgrim come?
Tralfamadore
Tralfamadore; its aliens see all of time at once and keep him in a zoo, inside a transparent dome furnished like a house.