Scarica Kurt Vonnegut - American Novelist e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Kurt Vonnegut American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (born November 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, New York), American writer noted for his wryly saKrical novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science ficKon to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilizaKon. Much of Vonnegut’s work is marked by an essenKally fatalisKc worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs. Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high school newspaper, and he conKnued the acKvity at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he majored in biochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army. Captured by the Germans during World War II, he was one of the survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in February 1945. A[er the war Vonnegut took graduate courses in anthropology at the University of Chicago while working as a reporter. He was later employed as a public relaKons writer in upstate New York, but his reservaKons about what he considered the decei]ulness of the profession led him to pursue ficKon wriKng full-Kme. In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were concerned with technology and the future, which led some criKcs to classify Vonnegut as a science ficKon writer, though he resisted the label. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), elaborates on those themes, visualizing a completely mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scienKsts and workers in a New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the enKre history of the human race is considered an accident aaendant on an alien planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship. Vonnegut abandoned science ficKon tropes altogether in Mother Night (1961; film 1996), a novel about an American playwright who serves as a spy in Nazi Germany. In Cat’s Cradle (1963) some Caribbean islanders, who pracKce a religion consisKng of harmless trivialiKes, come into contact with a substance discovered by an atomic scienKst that eventually destroys all life on Earth. (In 1963 the University of Chicago granted Vonnegut a master’s degree in anthropology a[er he submiaed Cat’s Cradle as a thesis.) The novel was parKcularly significant in its development of a slyly irreverent voice that constantly called aaenKon to its own arKfice; a similar “metaficKonal” style would characterize much of Vonnegut’s subsequent work. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) centres on the Ktle character, an eccentric philanthropist, but also introduces the writer Kilgore Trout, a ficKonal alter ego of Vonnegut who appears throughout his oeuvre. Although Vonnegut’s work had already gained a popular audience by the late 1960s, the publicaKon of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969; film 1972) cemented his reputaKon. Explicitly drawing on his Dresden experience, Vonnegut cra[ed an absurdist nonlinear narraKve in which the bombing raid serves as a symbol of the cruelty and destrucKveness of war through the centuries. CriKcs lauded Slaughterhouse-Five as a modern-day classic. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973; film 1999)—about a Midwestern businessman who becomes obsessed with Trout’s books—is a commentary on wriKng, fame, and American social values, interspersed with drawings by Vonnegut. Though reviews were mixed, it quickly became a
