With a style that mimics expensive liquor, equal parts biting and smooth, American author Kurt Vonnegut opens the aesthetic and imaginative palates of readership to the heady delights of his novels and stories. Vonnegut’s work holds a funhouse mirror to our conceptions of war, morality, and normative aesthetic sensibility, challenging us to consider our world from outside the proverbial box.

Though he was born in 1922 to a family of relative wealth in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kurt Vonnegut’s later childhood suffered under the financial strain of the Great Depression. Growing up, he had a propensity for writing and enjoyed working for his public school’s newspaper as an author and editor. This propensity continued into college, as Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in 1940 and became an active member of the Cornell Daily Sun, until low grades and illness prompted him to drop out in his junior year. After Cornell, Vonnegut enrolled in the US army and studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Technical Institute. He was sent to the front lines of the second world war in 1944, only months after his mother’s suicide, to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. There, he was captured and imprisoned by the German army and taken to Dresden to work in a German POW camp making vitamin supplements. During his time as a prisoner of war, Vonnegut witnessed the allied firebombing of Dresden, surviving only because he was working in an underground meat locker. This event was the inspiration for Vonnegut’s most famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, and would stay with him for the rest of his life.

After returning to the United States in 1945, he married his first wife and high school sweetheart, Jane Cox, and took a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He worked for General Electric Motors as a public relations writer until he became jaded with the work and began to write on his own full time, selling pieces to magazines and publishing his first novel, Player Piano, in 1950. Vonnegut continued to write prolifically from this point forward, but had to take extra jobs throughout his adult life to support his family, particularly after the untimely death of his sister and her husband in 1958 prompted Vonnegut to adopt three of their four children. Though many of his works during this time such as Mother Night (1961) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) were critically acclaimed and established him as a published writer, he was not a household name until 1969, with his release of Slaughterhouse Five, a work largely inspired by Vonnegut’s experience in the bombing of Dresden. After the publication, Vonnegut worked full-time as a traveling author and saw greater successes with his works. He wrote 14 novels in total throughout his lifetime, his last being Timequake (1997). Other than novels, he wrote essay collections such as A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America (2007), which criticized the Bush Administration, and Fates Worse Than Death (1991), an autobiographical work written after his attempt to take his own life in 1984. A few of his unfinished works were published posthumously such as Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) and We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012).

Kurt Vonnegut’s didactic albeit punchy style feels permanently current , even as his works age past the fiftieth anniversary of their vintage Vonnegut is one of the greatest authors of American literature, and the exuberance of his slightly demented, thoroughly humane artistic vision lives on in the wealth of his novels, essays, and stories.