http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070412/ap_on_re_us/obit_vonnegut


又一位超級寫手離開人間......
前年在德勒斯登,主要就是感受他大戰當戰俘時受困地窖忍受英美聯軍用燒夷彈 ”細細折磨德國”的迷惘和徬徨........

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’Slaughterhouse-Five’ author Vonnegut dies at 84 Thu Apr 12, 3:40 AM ET


Kurt Vonnegut, the creator of wry science fiction and black comedy built on his experience as a World War II prisoner of war who survived the horrific Dresden bombing, died late Tuesday, the New York Times reported.

Vonnegut was the author of ”Slaughterhouse-Five,” widely rated as one of the finest American novels of the 20th century, ”Cat’s Cradle,” and ”Breakfast of Champions.”

He died aged 84 in New York City after suffering brain injuries in a fall several weeks ago, according to his longtime friend Morgan Entrekin, the Times reported on its website Wednesday.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1922, Vonnegut was captured inside German lines in 1945 following the Battle of the Bulge.

Confined to an underground meatpacking cellar in Dresden when Allied bombers descended upon the city, he was one of just seven US prisoners who survived the devastating firestorm that engulfed the city.

That experience formed the core of ”Slaughterhouse Five,” published in the midst of the furor over the Vietnam war in 1969 to widespread acclaim.

”All this happened, more or less,” is the memorable line opening the metaphysical, humanist tale of a soldier ”unstuck in time” in an underground Dresden abattoir.

After the war he moved to Chicago where he worked as a local police reporter and entered the University of Chicago in pursuit of a master’s degree in anthropology.

His thesis on ”The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales,” was famously rejected by all the members of a faculty panel, and he only earned the degree in 1971 when the university accepted ”Cat’s Cradle” as the thesis.

In 1947 he moved to New York and began writing for magazines and took up odd jobs. He published his first of 14?? novels in 1952. ”Player Piano” was a futuristic study of a society dominated by machines but with deep divides between upper and lower classes, painted with the irony and humor that identified his later novels.

His next book, ”The Siren of Titans,” came out in 1959, another science fiction novel heavy with satire and featuring the ”Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.”

But his name was made in 1963 with the publishing of ”Cat’s Cradle.” Heavily autobiographical, it featured a narrator who is an author writing a book about the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, called ”The Day the World Ended.”

The book has ever since become a standard for literature students in US schools.

He continued to publish short stories and essays, and then hit the tops of book sales charts in 1969 with Slaughterhouse Five:

”All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”

He published his last full-length book, ”Timequake,” in 1997, and wrote in his later years searing and humorous asides in the Chicago leftist magazine ”In These Times.”

Months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he bemoaned the coming war:

”I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.”

Vonnegut was married twice. His first wife was Jane Marie Cox, whom he married after returning from the war. With Cox he had three children. They also adopted the three children of Vonnegut’s sister after she died of cancer.

He separated from Cox in the 1970s and they divorced in 1979, after which he married photographer Jill Krementz. They also adopted a child.