Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 – New York Times:
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,†“Cat’s Cradle†and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater†caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
When I was in college, and you ran across someone sitting cross-legged in a public place, reading a book, it was either A Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, or anything by Kurt Vonnegut. He taught us to laugh at what we saw that was sad, and to realize that what we laughed at, was often because of the sadness in it.
So let’s enjoy a laugh, because the world is a much less interesting place without him!
My pennies are covered for Kurt Vonnegut!
I may very well be retarded, but I can’t find a way to contact you by e-mail on your blog. Do you do any freelance writing? Contact me if you do!
I wanted to second the Vonnegut-love. Though, mine is a more Gen X teenage boy writing crush. There is nobody out there like him (Chuck Palahnikuk is the closest and he seems to have the nihlism without the leavening of humanism)…My favorite story of his was when he talked to the Humanist society after Isaac Asimov died.
“‘Isaac is up in heaven now’. It was the funniest thing I could think of to say to an audience of humanists. Believe me, it worked – I rolled them in the aisles. If I should ever die, god forbid, I hope people will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now’. That’s my favourite joke.”
I read nearly all of Vonnegut in high school, and the film adaptation of “Slaughter House Five” was really quite good. In fact, I need to see it again.
A running statement in my office when things get tough is “If we only had some Ice Nine…”
Jim H