NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Huffington Post • Kansas City Star
• Time Out New York • Kirkus Reviews
This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all
the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a
sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never
before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny
wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide.
Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a
twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being
freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing
of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece
Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a
struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing
with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry
letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his
work; remembrances penned to high school classmates,
fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of
commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail
Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud.
Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce
prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a
crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a
tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade
authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give
John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan
Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add
considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind
literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter
brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which
he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable
nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut
lexicon.
• On a job he had as a young man: “Hell is running an elevator
throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.”
• To a relative who calls him a “great literary figure”: “I am
an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.”
• To his daughter Nanny: “Most letters from a parent contain a
parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.”
• To Norman Mailer: “I am cuter than you are.”
Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and
always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true
cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the
autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.
Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
“Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . .
chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”—Kurt Andersen, The
New York Times Book Review
“[This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and
mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the
same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over
his entire life.”—NPR
“Congenial, whimsical and often inful missives . . . one of
[Vonnegut’s] very best.”—Newsday
“These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s
fiction—smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.”—The New York Times
Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.