"In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.
On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy
the following letter. He didn't receive a reply."
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Apr 5, 2012 -
50 comments
In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. "Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city", Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."
-
Survivor:
How Kurt Vonnegut created a novel, a cult following and one of the most loyal readerships in American Fiction by Thomas Meaney in The Times Literary Supplement.
posted by Kattullus
on Mar 11, 2012 -
85 comments
A Missouri school board
has voted to remove Slaughter House Five and another book from the library for "teaching principles contrary to the Bible."
[more inside]
posted by Leezie
on Aug 2, 2011 -
187 comments
Mr. Vonnegut talked about my dad a lot and put him into a lot of his books. Sometimes he was Dad, and sometimes he was just a character Mr. Vonnegut made up. So what I would say to any of you who are wondering is this: My dad was what people called a real character, which always made us laugh because it was so literally true owing to his association with a famous fiction writer. He could also get pretty obnoxious. But he was a good man. And he definitely wasn’t crazy. At least not until the brain tumor.
Kurt Vonnegut Didn't Know Doodly-Squat About Writing: Finally, Literary Analysis Worth Reading by Bernard V. O'Hare, with an introduction by Meghan O'Hare.
posted by shakespeherian
on Nov 3, 2010 -
49 comments
In
How to Write a Great Novel authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Hilary Mantel, Orhan Pamuk, Junot Díaz and Margaret Atwood speak about their writing process. If you want your thoughts on writing in a longer format, you could do a lot worse than The New York Times'
Writers on Writing series, which features short essays by, for example,
Kurt Vonnegut,
Saul Bellow,
Louise Erdrich and
Annie Proulx. Should you thirst for meditations longer yet,
Barbara Demarco-Barrett has on her
Writers on Writing radio show interviewed a
boatload of authors and it is available as a
podcast [iTunes link]
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 11, 2009 -
22 comments
2BR02B is a short story by the late Kurt Vonnegut
(so it goes) from 1962, brought to you now by Project Gutenberg.
posted by buriednexttoyou
on May 4, 2007 -
17 comments
Vonnegut's Asshole. To be honest, this wasn't originally intended as a tribute to the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. It started as a goofy experiment, just to find out how many authors I could persuade to send me drawings of their own assholes. But then Kurt went and died on us last week. So now it's become something else.
posted by roll truck roll
on Apr 18, 2007 -
19 comments
Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 "His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States."
.
posted by landedjentry
on Apr 11, 2007 -
616 comments
Beware the
Ides of
March. Almost everyone knows that the phrase comes from the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar, most familiarly in the
Shakespeare version, although
"The Life of Augustus," written by Nicolauas of Damascus, contains what is thought to be the earliest narrative of the plot to murder Julius Caesar, based in part on eyewitness accounts. But, not everyone knows that The Ides Of March is also a
band [flash intro] (best known for the song
"Vehicle")
[YouTube], an epistolatory
novel by Thornton Wilder (with forward by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.), an
instrumental song by Iron Maiden [YouTube], and two paintings, one by
Edward Poynter and one by
Andrew Wyeth.
posted by amyms
on Mar 15, 2007 -
10 comments
Vonnegut Weighs in on the State of the Union. As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?
Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can't help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.
posted by crasspastor
on Jan 30, 2003 -
80 comments
