Kurt Vonnegut: The Man Behind the Books

From his birth in Indianapolis to his death in New York, his life was one horror story to another, but he managed to always turn his cynicism into amazing literature. Many people know, read, and love the books that Kurt Vonnegut writes, but few know about Kurt Vonnegut, his life, and his origins.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11th 1922, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was already on the right track for success: His parents, Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and Edith Lieber, attended MIT and were architects for a local firm. After graduating high school he was accepted to Cornell, where he edited for a school paper and majored in Chemistry. It was at Cornell where he enlisted into the US Army.

His time in the Army had a huge influence on who he would become for a few reasons: Before he left, his mother committed suicide on Mother's Day in 1944 by way of sleeping pills, and he was captured by Germans in late 1944, and was held in Dresden.
His mother's suicide was a major contributor to his cynical view on society, but personally, it didn't affect him much.
His time as a POW, however, had quite possibly the biggest influence on his writing of anything he experienced. His story, Slaughterhouse Five, was very autobiographical in the sense that most of the things that happened to Billy Pilgrim in the book(in War), happened to Kurt Vonnegut(in War).

After the war, he attended University of Chicago, where he studied Anthropology. Although he was a self-admitted poor anthropology student, and only in 1963 U of Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle as Vonnegut's thesis and gave him his master's. Cat's Cradle is one of Vonnegut's first big-selling books, one of his most memorable, and one of his favorites.
(Kurt assessed all of his own books and gave them letter grades:
[Cat's Cradle: A+
Slaughterhouse-Five:A+
The Sirens of Titan:A
Breakfast of Champions:C])

In 1973, when Vonnegut published Breakfast of Champions, people began to see that, aside from being an enthralling writer, he was also able to create stories that weren't written with a basic structure, yet were still followed fairly easily. Vonnegut included a kind of autobiography mixed with first/third person writing by including himself, as the Creator of the Universe, in Breakfast.