Kurt Vonnegut’s Humanism: An Interview with Wayne Laufert, author of Behaving Decently: Kurt Vonnegut’s Humanism In his late career book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation...
For Kurt Vonnegut, writing was an act of good citizenship, his way of “poisoning the minds of young people” with humanity. In Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship (Seven Stories Press), Christina Jarvis explores how Vonnegut...
Over the past few years a renewed focus on the issue of race in America has entered the public conversation. In 2021, writer S.G. Ellerhoff taught a class at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library (KVML) on Vonnegut and race as part of KVML’s annual...
And All Music is Sacred – An Interview with Richard Auldon Clark In A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut writes that music “makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.” During his last fifteen years, Vonnegut shared his passion...
On October 1, 2020, Readings from Kurt Vonnegut: WordPlay by David Hoppe will be performed by The Phoenix Theater as a fundraiser for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis. For tickets, visit the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library website. The play’s creator, David Hoppe, shared his...
If there’s a Disney World for hard-core Vonnegut fans, it just might be at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, home of the Kurt Vonnegut Manuscript archives, a collection of papers, letters, drafts, and other treasures donated by Vonnegut to the Library. Isabel H. Planton, Public...
In a fine essay published by The New Yorker, Salman Rushdie offers his thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five. Comparisons to Catch-22 and War and Peace are mixed with reflections on Vonnegut's exploration of free will and the cheerfulness at the core of Vonnegut's work. The...
Kurt Vonnegut Remembered, recently published by The University of Alabama Press, is a must-read for Vonnegut fans as it traces the author’s life through a series of essays and recollections from those who knew him best. The list of contributors ranges from well-known media figures like Geraldo Rivera and...
Need something to do this summer? Why not tackle the Vonnegut canon? In 2013 Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon, two friends and writers with a passion for literature, criticism, and Kurt Vonnegut, launched their Summer of Vonnegut, a critical conversation in which the two writers...
It's been fifty years since Delacorte Press first published Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, on March 31, 1969. The novel's popularity and influence continue to this day, and though Vonnegut, in the book's long introduction, described it as "a failure, and it had to be,...