Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American novelist and satirist, author of Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), whose darkly comic fiction drew on his experience of the firebombing of Dresden.

He was born on 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Serving in the US Army in the Second World War, he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing in a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse. After the war he worked for General Electric as a technical writer and then a publicist, leaving at the start of 1951 to write full time.

His first novel, Player Piano, a satire on automation, was published by Scribner's in 1952. It was followed by The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Slaughterhouse-Five, published on 31 March 1969, made him famous and has often been challenged and banned in American schools. Later novels include Breakfast of Champions (1973), Galápagos (1985) and Timequake (1997), the last of his fourteen novels. He died in New York City on 11 April 2007.

For collectors. Player Piano (Scribner's, 1952) is his first novel. Slaughterhouse-Five was first published in hardback in the United States by Delacorte in 1969; Open Library also lists Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence and Cape among the novel's publishers. Open Library records Gollancz as a British publisher of The Sirens of Titan.