VONNEWEEK: Good morning.

KURT: Good morning.

VONNEWEEK: Our readers would like to know about your background.

KURT: What would you like to know?

VONNEWEEK: When and where were you born? Who are you parents?

KURT: I was born on November 11, (Armistice Day) 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. My father, also a Kurt, was an architect like my grandfather and my mother was an at-home mom. They were married on November 22, 1913.

VONNEWEEK: Do you have any siblings?

KURT: Yes. I’m the youngest of three children. My brother Bernard was seven years older than me. My sister, Alice, was five years older than me.

VONNEWEEK: You say, "was". Why?

KURT: Bernie died just three short years ago, very peacefully. Cancer took Alice’s life when she was just 41.

VONNEWEEK: I’m sorry to hear that.

KURT: It’s ok. So it goes.

VONNEWEEK: Right. What kind of education did you get in Indianapolis?

KURT: As I recall, I spent all my primary education at Orchard School. Then I attended Shortridge High School. I think it was excellent education.

VONNEWEEK: Did Shortridge have a school paper?

KURT: Yes. Yes it did. I had almost forgotten about that. The Shortridge Daily Echo. I was a reporter, columnist, and even the editor my senior year.

VONNEWEEK: Any high school sweethearts?

KURT: Of course! Jane Marie Cox, my first wife. We first met in Kindergarten and dated in high school. I married her after the war.

VONNEWEEK: I understand you attended four colleges. What’s the story there?

KURT: I first attended Cornell University as a biochemistry major. I also worked on the school paper, the Cornell Sun, as a columnist and managing editor. I almost flunked out.

VONNEWEEK: "Did you or your family at that time think it was disgraceful that you were having academic problems?" (Allen 246).

KURT: "I think their [my parent’s] feelings about it – as I was very close to being thrown out and would have been thrown out for academic reasons because I had no gift for science really, and that’s what I was in – was they would have said, ‘That’s it.’ But I myself wanted to be a journalist and wondered if I wanted to go to college at all…. The problem was I didn’t look old enough to be a very effective reporter. But you didn’t need a college education to get a job, not even a good job in those days, so there wasn’t much of a risk then" (Allen 246).

VONNEWEEK: What else do you remember about Cornell?

KURT: "My father wanted me to learn ‘something useful.’ Cornell was a boozy dream, partly because of the booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for" ("Vonnegut, Kurt Jr." 593).

VONNEWEEK: What about Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago?

KURT: I volunteered for military service after Pearl Harbor and because I had some college and been in ROTC, they sent me to what was then Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. They taught me how to fire a 240-millimeter howitzer. After the war I enrolled in the anthropology program at the University of Chicago.

VONNEWEEK: Tell me about your war experience.

KURT: Where should I begin? I don’t know if you’re going to mention it, so I might as well say it. My mother committed suicide the day before Mother’s Day 1944. I obtained special leave from my duties as an infantry battalion scout and went home.

VONNEWEEK: How did she kill herself?

KURT: She overdosed on sleeping pills. It was a result of her ever-increasing depression.

VONNEWEEK: Why was she depressed?

KURT: My mother took up writing fiction for magazines after we lost our family fortune in the Great Depression. She began to realize that this venture would never prosper as she had hoped.

VONNEWEEK: Was she a good writer?

KURT: "She was a good writer, it turned out, but she had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required. Fortunately, I was loaded with vulgarity, so, when I grew up, I was able to make her dream come true. Writing for Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening

Post, and Cosmopolitan, and Ladies’ Home Journal and so on was as easy as falling off a log for me. I only wish she’d lived to see it" ("Vonnegut, Kurt Jr." 594).

VONNEWEEK: When did you go to war?

KURT: Oh, it was sometime in the late summer of 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge. I was assigned to the 106^th Infantry Division, 2^nd Battalion, 423^rd Regiment.

VONNEWEEK: And you were captured?

KURT: Yes. Our regiment was completely unprepared for a major German offensive. I was an advance infantry scout, so I was captured quite easily. They shipped me and about hundred other prisoners of war on boxcars to Dresden.

VONNEWEEK: What was Dresden like?

KURT: Dresden was the most beautiful city I had ever seen. "The Florence of the Elbe," they say. It’s true. Well, it was true. We were put in a converted slaughterhouse. Number five, if I recall correctly. They [the Germans] put me to work in a factory making some vitamin goop/malt syrup for pregnant women. It didn’t taste that bad. Kurt laughs lightly.

VONNEWEEK: Tell me about February 13 and 14, 1945.

KURT: What’s there to say about a massacre? I survived with a few lucky souls in a large meat locker three stories beneath the surface. We knew it was going to be bad, but we didn’t realize how bad it was until we actually surfaced.

VONNEWEEK: What did you do then?

KURT: "Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure…. One hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground. It was a terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt…. We would bust into the shelter, gather up valuable from people’s laps without attempting identification, and turn the valuables over to guards. The soldiers would come in with a flame-thrower and stand in the door and cremate the people inside…. It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing. It was a moment of truth, too, because American civilians and ground troops didn’t know American bombers were engaged in saturation bombing. It was kept a secret until very close to the end of the war" ("Vonnegut, Kurt Jr." 594).

VONNEWEEK: I don’t want to dwell too long on this subject, so could you briefly tell us how you got back home.

KURT: Sure. The advancing Russian Army scared away all the German troops by April. In May I was repatriated and given the Purple Heart. I spent a little time in France recuperating, and then they shipped me home.

VONNEWEEK: What did you do after the war?

KURT: One of the first things I did was marry that high school sweetheart of mine, Jane Marie. In December of that same year, we moved to Chicago and I started studying anthropology at the University of Chicago.

VONNEWEEK: Did you work for the school paper there, too?

KURT: No, I moved up in the world. I worked part-time as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau.

VONNEWEEK: Tell me about your Master’s thesis.

KURT: What Master’s thesis? Kurt laughs loudly.

VONNEWEEK: It’s good that you can have sense of humor about it.

KURT: It’s good to have a sense of humor about a lot of things, Jeff. Well, the anthropology faculty unanimously rejected my thesis, "On the Fluctuations between Good and Evil in Simple Tales". I was discouraged, but not devastated. I had a job lined up for me already.

VONNEWEEK: What job was that?

KURT: It was a public relations job at General Electric. My brother worked as a research physicist there.

VONNEWEEK: How long did that last?

KURT: Only three years. My interest was not there. I wanted to devote more time to writing. In 1951, I quit my job at G. E. and moved to Massachusetts, to write full-time.

VONNEWEEK: Did you meet success relatively easily?

KURT: No. I published my first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," in 1950 and my first novel, "Piano Player," in 1952. Neither were great successes. I found other ways to supplement the family income.

I taught English for a short time at Hopefield High School and opened the second Saab dealership in America.

VONNEWEEK: Wow! You opened the second Saab dealership? I love Saabs. I wish I could afford one. Hey, do you think you can get me a good deal?

KURT: No.

VONNEWEEK: Oh.

VONNEWEEK: Ok, tell me about 1958.

KURT: 1958 turned out to be a very tumultuous year. My brother-in-law, John, was killed in a tragic train accident. Within the next 24 hours, my sister, Alice, succumbed to cancer. Jane and I ended up adopting their three kids, James, Steven, and Kurt Adams (Tiger).

VONNEWEEK: What happened next in your career?

KURT: I published a lot of books. Namely, The Sirens of Titans in 1959, Mother Night in 1962, Cat’s Cradle in 1963, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965. I was given the opportunity to work at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in 1965, which I graciously accepted. In 1967 I was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and was able to travel back to Dresden and research for Slaughterhouse-Five.

VONNEWEEK: What happened after Slaughterhouse-Five was published?

KURT: Well, I guess the rest is history. The publication of Slaughterhouse-Five brought me national prominence as a writer. Suddenly I was being awarded for my writing and asked to give speeches and lectures. I was even asked to teach creative writing at Harvard University. I finally received my master’s degree from the University of Chicago 25 years late.

VONNEWEEK: Did you focus your talents on just novels?

KURT: No, I wrote a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which ran for six months on Broadway, but it was a horrible play. I even wrote a symphony called Requiem, which was performed by the Buffalo Symphony in 1988. George Roy Hill made Slaughterhouse-Five into a great movie in 1972. I highly recommend it. I wrote one child’s book Sun/Star/Moon in 1980.

VONNEWEEK: How was your family life?

KURT: Jane and I had three children of our own, Mark, Edith, and Nanette, in addition to my sister’s three children. Jane and I separated in 1971, when I moved to New York City alone. We finally got a formal divorce in 1979 when I married Jill Krementz. Jill and I adopted Lili when she was born 1982.

VONNEWEEK: Wait a minute, you have a daughter who was born in 1982? I was born in 1982! She’s my age and I bet she’s a junior in high school also. Hmm.…

KURT: Don’t get any bright ideas.

VONNEWEEK: Oh, I wouldn’t think of it.

KURT: Good.

VONNEWEEK: I understand you attempted suicide in 1984?

KURT: Yes that is true. It is not something I am proud of, but nevertheless I attempted killing myself by overdosing on sleeping pills and alcohol. The same way my mother did.

VONNEWEEK: Do you have anything else to say about it?

KURT: Only that I did it because I was generally pissed off at the world and because it was 40 years after my mother committed suicide. I don’t have any plans to pursue this effort further.

VONNEWEEK: How many novels have you published?

KURT: Fifteen.

VONNEWEEK: How many short stories?

KURT: I have two books that are collections of short stories, but I can’t remember all the short stories I’ve written, there are dozens. I also have three works of non-fiction that make up my autobiography.

VONNEWEEK: Besides Slaughterhouse-Five, have there been any movies made from you books?

KURT: Yes. First there was the disastrous Happy Birthday, Wanda June. I wrote the screenplay, but it still ended up being horrible. Don’t try to see that one. In 1983, a film version of Slapstick came out. The director, Stephen Paul, was only 20 at the time and the movie reflects his inexperience in the business. Everyone regards it as just plain terrible. In 1996, Mother Night was released. It is wonderful. Go out and rent it if you can. The latest is Breakfast of Champions, just last year. It is a Bruce Willis project and circulated only in limited release. But I don’t know where you can get it.

VONNEWEEK: Have you ever been in a movie?

KURT: I have a short cameo in Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield. He pays me to write an essay about myself. The paper is graded ‘F,’ because the instructor says something like, ‘whomever wrote this obviously knew nothing about Vonnegut!’

VONNEWEEK: What is your latest novel?

KURT: Timequake, published in 1997.

VONNEWEEK: Has there been one author that has influenced you the most?

KURT: If I had to name just one author I look up to, it would be Mark Twain. "…At the end of a profoundly meaningful life…[he] asked himself what it was we all lived for. He came up with six words, which satisfied him. They satisfy me, too. They should satisfy you: ‘The good opinion of our neighbors’" (Huber).

VONNEWEEK: Are there any plans for a novel in the future?

KURT: I’m not at liberty to say at the moment. No one knows quite for sure what the future holds.

VONNEWEEK: Is there anything you would like to say to the next generation of your readers?

KURT: "…Every graduation address I’ve delivered has ended…with old stuff about my Uncle Alex, my father’s kid brother. A Harvard graduate, Alex Vonnegut was locally useful in Indianapolis as an honest insurance agent. He was also well-read and wise. One thing which Uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings was that they seldom took time out to notice when they were happy. He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and he would interrupt the conversation to say, ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ So, I hope that you…will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’" (Huber).