FROM TODAY'S SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Counterculture idol Kurt Vonnegut has died at his home in Manhattan, aged 84, The New York Times reports.
The literary iconoclast's death was reported by family friend Morgan Entrekin, who told the paper that Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Vonnegut was a novelist known for his dark humour and metaphysical and science fiction content. He wrote 14 novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Timequake during a career that began in 1950 with the publication of a short story in the magazine Colliers.
His books were described as dark, comic narratives that blended science fiction, metaphysics, and humanism.
Slaughterhouse-Five, based on his experience during the firebombing of Dresden while being held there as a prisoner of war, brought the horrors of the bombing to the public's attention and became his most famous work.
"The firebombing of Dresden was a work of art," Vonnegut wrote. It was "a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany".
Vonnegut, the youngest of three children, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922 and was a third generation German-American.
He is survived by his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, and seven children.
8 Comments
choggieAs it happens, as does all life and death, chance, luck, destiny, and fate, as well as karma, (for all you atheists and Mennonites), Kurt found a way to bow out gracefully, what anyone can expect from a trip through the glass darkly....
Dropping the third person for a tick, MY absolute favorite fiction/friction writer, hands down....If you have never read ANY Vonnegut, start with anything he wrote, and become instantly addicted.....unless you are the antichrist, or a teamster.....
Love You Kurt, may you be welcomed into the afterlife by a beginning with a gradual process of dissolution, in which the senses and energies that worked in cooperation with consciousness degenerate by stages.....or by Phil Hartman in dreadlocks and pasties!!!
Oh and he fell down went boom, alla Evolution in Action.....good thing he spread his seed about a bit.........TIMES SEVEN!!!!!(dear lord, please send me back as a fig on the family tree......hope for the future, comes in screaming packages....)
SpiffI'm going to miss Kurt Vonnegut. I'm glad he left some of his alter egos with us. (Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-ll Swain, etc.)
choggieshit, i hope i get some bitchin' eulogies, tired of officiating funerals.......
doremifaYou beat me to it. Glad I could be a part of this granfalloon.
sbchapmGreat quote from Wonkette: "Vonnegut lived about a dozen years longer than the average American male, due to his chain-smoking and rage and beach house. We will miss him."
bigbikeman"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."
- Bluebeard
Just so, there are moments with and without. He will be missed.
calvadosRIP KV. You were my fave author.
MycroftHomlzSo it goes.
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