Counterculture idol Kurt Vonnegut has died at his home in Manhattan, aged 84.
Vonnegut, who often marvelled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks ago, his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, said.
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”.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanising people.
“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious sceptic and free-thinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, he drew a headstone with the epitaph: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, he battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984 he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.
He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” he wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POWs inside an underground meat locker labelled slaughterhouse-five.
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 and seven children.
Works by Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano, 1951
The Sirens of Titan, 1959
Canary in a Cat House, 1961 (short works)
Mother Night, 1961
Cat’s Cradle, 1963
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, 1965
Welcome to the Monkey House, 1968 (short works)
Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969
Happy Birthday, Wanda June, 1971 (play)
Between Time and Timbuktu, 1972 (TV script)
Breakfast of Champions, 1973
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, 1974 (opinions)
Slapstick, 1976
Jailbird, 1979
Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, 1981 (essays)
Deadeye Dick, 1982
Galapagos, 1985
Bluebeard, 1987
Hocus Pocus, 1990
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, 1991 (essays)
Timequake, 1997
A Man Without a Country, 2005 (essays)
- with AP Dylan Welch
