Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Live From ICC: Kurt Vonnegut About this episode Holly is joined by guest host Bryan Young for a live show at Indiana Comic Con, focused on the life and work of the author Kurt Vonnegut, known for his dark humor and dystopian visions of the future.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:38 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:49 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
1:51 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
1:53 Holly Frey? Tracy, we have an episode that you're not in.
1:55 Tracy V. Wilson? I know, it was a, you asked me about whether it would be okay to do this and I was like, absolutely, even before you told me that the subject was Kurt Vonnegut. And when you said that, I was like, I already was on board with the idea of, you know, a live episode with a, with a guest host because I will not be at the event. Uh, but now that you've said Kurt Vonnegut and that Brian Young is going to be the co-host, I am excited about it.
2:23 Holly Frey? Yeah, uh, both Brian and I were, uh, panelists and guests at Indiana Comic-Con and, uh, we talked a lot about Star Wars things while we were there, but it occurred to us, I think it was actually Brian's idea, that Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis and this kind of makes a lot of sense.
2:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
2:42 Holly Frey? So I was like, great, let's do that. Uh, and we did. We also went to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum that morning before the show, which was very moving and wonderful. We'll talk about all that on Behind the Scenes. Listen, spoiler alert, I cried three times doing this episode.
2:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm-hmm.
2:58 Holly Frey? Now is one of those times in life when I really wish we had Kurt and I'm also really glad he's gone, um, cause I don't think he would enjoy the world we're living in right now. But, uh, I'm really grateful to Brian Young, who has been on our show before. He was our first guest at a live show, uh, so this kind of felt very natural. And, uh, thank you to Indiana Comic-Con as well for having us. There's also a little heads up, there's what I didn't even think of as a swear because my family didn't growing up, but Tracy flagged it as a swear because her family would have.
3:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
3:30 Holly Frey? Which was one of those great moments of like, oh, how different worlds exist in, uh, the everyday.
3:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:37 Holly Frey? It's pretty minor.
3:39 Tracy V. Wilson? If you are a Kurt Vonnegut fan, you probably already know what the swear is.
3:43 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's from one of his famous quotes. It invokes a deity. That's all. It's not, not anything, not anything big, but if you are a parent or a teacher, you may want to preview and make sure, you know, you're cool with it or that you have a plan in place to address that language with your kids.
4:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, and we'll also say that Kurt Vonnegut lived through some pretty tough stuff. There are some real difficult moments in this episode.
4:06 Holly Frey? Yeah, he, for all his wit, that was clearly part of how he coped with a lot of, of rough times in his life. And be aware, there is discussion, not only of some pretty horrific wartime events, but there are also multiple discussions of suicide in it, as well as just incredible horrible loss. So just be aware of all of that going in. Worthwhile, in my opinion, to talk about Kurt Vonnegut, who I will wax rhapsodic about on Friday. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
4:42 Speaker 05 And I'm not Tracy V. Wilson. I'm Brian Young.
4:46 Holly Frey? Yeah. Brian is a longtime friend of the show. He was on our first live show ever.
4:51 Speaker 05 Ever.
4:51 Holly Frey? About, talking about his book about presidential assassination for children, which is pretty spectacular. And I recommend you check it out if it's still available.
5:00 Speaker 05 It is. You can still get a children's illustrated history of presidential assassination online or signed copies on my website at swankmotron.com.
5:10 Holly Frey? Perfect.
5:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:11 Holly Frey? Perfect. It is charming as all get out. So today, because we're here in Indiana and in Indianapolis specifically, Brian actually mentioned the idea of like, this is really the time to talk about Kurt Vonnegut, who is someone both he and I love and have bonded over, over the years. And he is, of course, you know, the son of the city, as it were. We both grew up with him. I mean, I think often when you hear people talk about Vonnegut and where they discovered him, it's usually in their teenage years when they encounter an author, either because it's recommended in school or because they just stumble on
5:50 Holly Frey? it. And it's finally an adult in the literature space who is not feeding them bull in any way. It's very straightforward. And it is, in some ways, very subversive in a way that's very appealing to teenagers. And then if you're like me, you never mature and you stick with it the whole time.
6:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, Vonnegut was definitely someone I encountered as a teenager and really latched on to. I found him in a band books club in high school, which seems so like you wouldn't be able to get away with that today, the way you could, you know, 25. More than 25 years ago.
6:27 Holly Frey? Sort of quaint now.
6:29 Speaker 05 And I've just always been in in love with his work. And for a long time, I was reading his entire library like every year. And now revisiting it always feels like revisiting an old friend.
6:43 Holly Frey? Yeah.
6:43 Speaker 05 And I come to a lot of conventions here in Indiana, Indianapolis specifically. And I always take that visit to the Vonnegut Museum with, which is within walking distance. And in fact, Holly and I went this morning and took a visit there and spent way too much in the museum shop.
7:00 Holly Frey? Unconscionable amount of money in the museum shop, just.
7:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, I love my favorite are the Kilgore Trout covers that they have on the postcards. They're so lurid and ridiculous. I love them.
7:14 Holly Frey? Yeah. So without further ado, we are going to talk about this amazing writer who we all love and his life story. So Brian, you want to kick it off?
7:23 Speaker 05 I would love to. So Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father Kurt Senior was an architect and the German American Vonnegut family had been prosperous. Their fortunes shifted, though, when Kurt Junior was a teenager as the Great Depression played out. Architecture projects were few and far between, and the other family businesses faltered. The Vonneguts had sent Kurt Junior's older brother and sister to private schools, but for him, public school was the only option. His mother, Edith, who'd been a high society debutante from a very wealthy family, was deeply dismayed by their loss of financial stability. So she tried to supplement the family's income
8:03 Speaker 05 by writing short stories, mostly romances. Sadly, that effort was for naught, as no one was willing to buy them.
8:11 Holly Frey? Yeah, Kurt, Kurt Junior, that is, wrote for the high school newspaper, and he actually credited that time as really teaching him the basics of journalism and how to convey stories and ideas very quickly and succinctly and incredibly clearly. Ironically, things that he would be kind of dinged for later in life as not being florid enough as a writer. But that's why I think young audiences really gravitate to him. After high school, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In what may seem like a bit of a surprising move, he majored in biochemistry. That was a bad choice for him. He did not excel.
8:51 Speaker 05 In 1943, Vonnegut left school to enlist in the army.
8:56 Speaker 05 He'd been struggling at school. His journalism efforts at the Cornell Sun were good, though they often caused controversy. He ran criticism of the ROTC, of which he was a member, which got him kicked out. He also wrote articles suggesting that the school paper in publishing patriotic writing was sharing propaganda. Then, when he started school in his junior year as the editor of the Sun, he ran a headline welcoming the classes of forty-four and two-thirds, forty-five and a fourth, or whatever. The US had joined the war in December 1941, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Vonnegut was making a nod to the fact that many of his classmates were likely to be called into service and
9:37 Speaker 05 die before finishing their college careers. He got pneumonia in late 1942, and that gave him a good excuse to leave school, and so he did, and then he enlisted.
9:47 Holly Frey? And he went to Fort Bragg for training. He brought his typewriter with him to basic training, but it was stolen. He was really good with weapons, so he got some artillery training, but his aptitude tests got him more attention, because he was clearly very smart. And he was selected to enter a mechanical engineering program that was supposed to end up with him getting a degree and an officer's commission. His grades in this program were kind of mixed, but ultimately that did not matter, because the program was shut down before he could finish.
10:19 Speaker 05 Kurt Jr. decided to visit his parents in their new place for Mother's Day 1944, and it was a trip that would really change the family forever. Kurt Sr., thanks to the war, had a steady income again, working in materials at various bases and facilities. And he designed a new home for himself in Edith, and this home in a quaint development in Marion County, Indiana. It was contemporary and smaller than their previous home. But Edith did not love it. It felt small, and not just in size. She was keenly aware of how her fortunes in life had changed, going from an aristocratic it-girl in Europe to an unknown Midwestern housewife. And she was also very unhappy about her son's choice to join the service.
11:05 Holly Frey? On Mother's Day morning during that visit, Edith was found dead by Kurt's sister Alice, who then went and got Kurt. Edith had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. This was not recorded officially as an intentional act. The coroner wrote it up as an accident to avoid the stigma that naturally goes along with death by suicide. But the family knew, although there have over the years been some debates over whether or not they were going to acknowledge this or not. And Kurt Senior actually asked the paper not to run his wife's obituary.
11:39 Speaker 05 This death really became a focal point for Vonnegut in his writing and in his personal interactions. Biographer Charles J. Shields noted of the writer, "For the rest of his life, he directed people's attention to the manner of his mother's death as if it were something they should know about him." In Vonnegut's books, it's fairly easy to trace a line from his own family tragedy to the way he writes about mothers. Mothers occupy a strange narrative space for him and tend to always be grappling with mental health issues. He makes what certainly seems to be a reference to his own mother's death in his 1973 book, Breakfast of Champions. This book, which we'll talk more about in a moment, is told from the point of view of Kilgore Trout,
12:22 Speaker 05 who's often described as being Vonnegut's fictional alter ego. And in Chapter 17, Kilgore Trout notes of another character, "Listen, Bunny's mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by, and both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny's mother ate Drano, and my mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn't nearly as horrible."
12:55 Holly Frey? Vonnegut actually had very little time to mourn his mother. The beaches of Normandy were stormed just a few weeks after her death, and Kurt was called to active duty shortly thereafter. Before he left, he proposed to his high school sweetheart, who did not really give him any kind of reply, that was Jane. And then, that autumn, he was on a ship headed to Belgium. After two weeks, in Cheltenham, England, he and his division, 106th, traveled across the English Channel by boat to La Havre, and then by truck into Belgium, where they were brought to replace the 2nd Division that had been holding the line against Germany's push.
13:31 Speaker 05 Almost immediately, Vonnegut's division was subjected to the opening of Hitler's Operation Herbstnabel, or Operation Autumn Mist, which targeted the Allies in Luxembourg and eastern Belgium. There was a near-constant barrage of fire. It was during this time that Vonnegut realized, to his disillusionment, that the scouting reconnaissance squad he was a part of was really just being thrown into areas that might contain mines or hidden Nazi strongholds, so they were totally expendable. During one of these scouting missions, on December 19th, he was taken as a prisoner of war. He and his fellow prisoners walked for two days under German guards until they were loaded into a boxcar, which then traveled for another two days.
14:15 Speaker 05 It was one of several boxcars carrying POWs.
14:19 Holly Frey? As they moved deeper and deeper into German territory, the boxcar and the others that it was connected to were caught up in Allied bombing. The first instance of this was at Limburg, which was heavily bombed by the Allies right after the boxcar that Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers were in was disconnected from its engine and left behind. There were scores of fatalities among the POWs, as some fled the cars only to run right into the Allies' line of fire. Over the next several days, Vonnegut's group was moved along until finally reaching Mülberg, where they were processed.
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18:13 Speaker 05 The entire experience was horror after horror. Many of the men were ill by this time, suffering from dysentery, malnourishment, frostbite. They all witnessed more death in just a few days than they could really even fathom. And many were near death when they arrived in Molberg. But when Vonnegut was given a postcard to send home, he told his family, "This life is not bad at all," and asked them to send cigarettes. Meanwhile, his family had been told Kurt Jr. was MIA, and they presumed the worst.
18:42 Holly Frey? Vonnegut was selected to be part of a work crew that was going to be sent to Dresden to clear the streets of rubble and do various factory work. Vonnegut was also given the job of translator and foreman in this group, as he spoke enough German to do so. These men were housed in a converted slaughterhouse. And at one point, Vonnegut was actually court-martialed by the Germans for insulting a Nazi officer after he had abused a sick POW. Vonnegut was beaten, and his foreman role was immediately taken away.
19:14 Speaker 05 If you read his letter home that he wrote, he talked about he was overheard telling the foreman what he'd like to do to him in German.
19:23 Holly Frey? Yes.
19:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was...
19:26 Speaker 05 It was not pleasant, no. So, uh, on the night of February 13th, 1945, the Allies began their bombing of Dresden. The POWs housed in the slaughterhouse were moved into a basement as the bombing destroyed the city. In the morning, the 150 men that Vonnegut was a part of were in an odd situation. They'd survived, but much of Dresden had not, and tens of thousands of casualties littered the streets of the destroyed city. Vonnegut's work crew was tasked with clearing the dead and cleaning up the city, salvaging what they could. It was made clear that if anyone took anything for themselves, they would be shot.
20:07 Speaker 05 So Vonnegut and his fellow POWs had to dig graves and in some cases, stack bodies and set them ablaze.
20:14 Holly Frey? As the war came to a close in the spring, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were eventually abandoned by their German captors and left to sort of fend for themselves. Kurt and several others were eventually traded for Soviet prisoners that the Allies had captured. And Vonnegut, at this point, like all of the men who had been captured, was in really rough shape, not just mentally, but also, he was physically a mess. He was malnourished and he was sickly, but he did make it home. He got through the forms that established him as no longer missing in action, which was apparently a little bit of an ordeal, and he was promoted to corporal. He also received a Purple Heart, which, sort of funnily enough, was for frostbite. And it's just funny, given all of the things that he lived through, that that's what he
20:59 Holly Frey? got his Purple Heart for.
21:00 Speaker 05 And you can go see it at the museum. They have it on display at the museum.
21:05 Holly Frey? He had started writing to his high school sweetheart, Jane, again, as soon as he was back in the US. Jane had dated other people when the two of them went to different colleges, and she was still sort of playing the field. In his letters, Kurt was so cautious to not assume that Jane was unmarried or single or available to him. But she was, and they met up in Washington where Jane was living. And then they both, just by happenstance of scheduling, traveled to Indianapolis at the same time. And once they were back home, Kurt proposed again, and at that point, the two were engaged.
21:41 Speaker 05 Kurt always claimed that his war experience hadn't been that bad, and he was fine. That family and friends shouldn't get emotional over it. But it did eventually come out in his writing, of course. In interviews, his daughter said that they never knew what he'd been through until they read Slaughterhouse Five. He was only 22 when he returned home.
22:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, that's a lot to process. If you think about it, right, your prefrontal cortex is not finished forming when you're in your early twenties, and he had gone through an extraordinary amount of trauma. But then, in the post-war 1940s, Vonnegut tried to move on. He focused on his future with Jane. They were married on September 14, 1945, and from the moment they became a married couple, Jane really became the driving force of his writing career. She was older than he was by a couple of years, and she had finished college, and she had a job in the Office of Strategic Services before she accepted Kurt's proposal, because women generally resign from their work once they were getting
22:40 Holly Frey? married, and that's what she did. Kurt was not always the warmest spouse, but Jane supported him, and she encouraged him to read more, starting with the Brothers Karamazov, which she presented him during their honeymoon. The two of them discussed literature, and that was a big part of their relationship. And while Kurt finished out his time in the service, she also urged him to write. And he would send all of the work that he did back home and let her edit it. And he was very, very deferential to her. He was like, "Do whatever you want with it. You know better than I do."
23:13 Speaker 05 The two of them also applied to the University of Chicago and both were accepted. Kurt's school was paid for by the GI Bill and he was already writing short stories with Jane's encouragement, but he also signed on for an anthropology program that would take him right through to a master's degree. The following year, Jane got pregnant, dropped out of her fellowship program. Vonnegut dropped out of his anthropology program that summer after his thesis proposal was rejected and their son Mark arrived on May 11, 1947. His thesis proposal was really fascinating and I'm like, I'm still mad that they rejected it.
23:49 Holly Frey? Yeah.
23:50 Speaker 05 His thesis for anthropology was that he thought that the shapes of stories were as equally interesting as the shards of pottery of any civilization. And he created a method where you could chart the shape of a culture's stories. And I teach a lot of writing classes and I use that a lot to help people visualize how stories work. But he didn't end up getting his degree until they accepted Cat's Cradle as his thesis years, years and years later.
24:19 Holly Frey? Yeah. After he left his, his program, he wrote for the Chicago City News Bureau, which was something that he had actually started while he was still in school. And he started to think finally about getting his fiction published and really focus on it. Money was really tight, though, and soon it became very apparent that he was going to need something dependable to bring in money to support Jane and their soon to be born son. So he turned to his brother Bernard, who was extremely famous in science circles. He was an accomplished atmospheric and environmental scientist and he worked with General Electric. Bernard was able to get Kurt a job as a publicist with the company. There's actually a pretty
25:01 Holly Frey? interesting story here where during the interview, the person that Kurt was interviewing with read on his, his application and his resume that he had been in Dresden during the bombing. And the man just looked up and said, I'm sorry, I was one of those bombers. And he got the job on the spot.
25:19 Holly Frey? I'm a little choked up. That job, though, he did not like it. He had a moral issue with PR work, which I love because he just thought it was inherently deceitful, and that was not something he really liked. He also thought that the field of science, which he had been excited to write about the things that people were doing at GE because a lot of scientists got to just kind of experiment, was not being handled in a responsible way, and it wasn't necessarily for the betterment of mankind.
25:50 Speaker 05 And it's that discomfort with PR with GE that really led him to pursue fiction writing as his full-time job. He started producing short stories and submitting them to publishers, but there were a lot of rejections. Still, Jane was his champion the whole time and even wrote to publishers herself to promote his work. The late 1940s were very lean times, and then finally, not long after the birth of their daughter Edith in 1950, Collier's Weekly published his short story "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," about a college professor who develops a sort of telekinesis and is used by the government as a weapon. The story is told by one of Professor Barnhouse's former students. Collier's and other magazines needed short stories.
26:35 Speaker 05 They were very popular with readers in the era before television became ubiquitous. So he soon had a lot more work and started to make good money. He'd promised himself that after he sold five stories, he'd quit his GE job, which he did. He and Jane then moved to Cape Cod in 1951.
26:51 Holly Frey? Yeah, he had this moment where he marveled that in the course of just a couple months, he had made more money as a writer than he would make in an entire year at GE, so he felt really bolstered by his decision.
27:01 Speaker 05 There was this interesting moment, too, where he also felt some shame because some of those were like, he was writing stuff for, like, Ladies' Home Journal. I know the one story that's sort of based in his life, "Long Walk to Forever," which was terrific. It's a great story, and it's about that time he went back home to sort of talk to Jane before he shipped off to the war. He felt a lot of shame about that story and it being like that he'd lived a moment in his life that would be in a ladies' glossy magazine. But it paid him well.
27:35 Holly Frey? Yeah, and Vonnegut continued to churn out fiction and make really good money for the first time in his life. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, and this was a book that was informed by his time at GE. It was something he could not have written and published while he was there, or he would have gotten fired. The plot is set in a mechanized society where most human labor has been replaced by machines, and society has split into the out-of-work laboring class and the overseeing engineers. And it examines, among other things, what happens to people when they have no immediate use and no contribution of value to society. He got labeled because of this as a science fiction writer, but that was not a pigeonhole he especially liked. Just
28:20 Holly Frey? because while he had nothing against science fiction, he knew that other people did not take it seriously as literature.
28:26 Speaker 05 So there was a seven-year gap between Player Piano and Vonnegut's second novel, The Sirens of Titan, which came out in 1959. And during those seven years, there were a lot of changes in Vonnegut's life. First, his daughter Nanette was born in 1954, then his father Kurt Senior died in the autumn of 1957, and then in 1958, Kurt's sister Alice, to whom he was extremely close, was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. While she was in the hospital, her husband Jim died suddenly in a train accident. And while the family tried to shield Alice from this news, she found out, though, there's a couple of different accounts about how she found out. One is that a nurse gave her
29:10 Speaker 05 a newspaper which mentioned the accident, and then the other is that the family, a family friend accidentally blurted it out. But regardless, Alice was heartbroken, and she died two days after learning about her husband's death. Kurt later said of his sister, quote, "She was the person I'd always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I'd ever achieved." He'd promised Alice that he would keep her four sons together, and he moved all of them into the house with him, Jane, and their three kids. It became a wild and boisterous home, and the kids, as adults, would note that Kurt was often grouchy with them and a little scary at times. But he could be fun, but he was moody.
29:52 Speaker 05 Jane was the one who kept it all together and served as a primary caretaker for their huge crew.
29:58 Holly Frey? Seven kids is a lot of kids. Sirens of Titan, which examines space and time travel, free will, and what it means to try to outrun your destiny, was really pretty well received by critics. It was a Hugo Award finalist for 1960. His follow-up in 1961 was his book, Mother Night, and this is a step away from science fiction, which he was becoming known for, so it's a little risky. This is a fictional memoir written by a Nazi propagandist while he awaits his trial for war crimes. There's a spy twist in the work. I almost don't want to say more because it's a really fun narrative as it unfolds. And this story would eventually be adapted into stage and screen like a lot of Vonnegut's
30:42 Holly Frey? subsequent work, including the 1996 film starring Nick Nolte, which Vonnegut has a really beautiful cameo in.
30:49 Speaker 05 It's really good. See it.
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31:52 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
32:37 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:54 Speaker 05 1963 saw the release of Cat's Cradle, and this was inspired by the lab at GE, where scientists had been allowed to experiment for the sake of pure science. There is a frequently told story that one of the scientists there suggested the idea of water that solidified at room temperature to author H.G. Wells when he visited the lab. But Wells never used the idea. Vonnegut decided it was okay to use it himself. He uses it as the concept of Ice Nine to examine the ways that science can be weaponized. He also introduced a fictional religion in the book called Bochenonism, which involved a number of absurd practices. Some of the vocabulary of this faux religion would also be used a decade later
33:39 Speaker 05 to name a collection of short story writings by Vonnegut called Wampers, Foma, and Grand Faloons.
33:45 Holly Frey? The novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was released in 1965, and it's in this book that Vonnegut introduces what has become known as his fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout. The name was a play on the name of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Trout appeared in numerous books after this time. And while he changed personality a little bit and details give from book to book, he was always a writer. And in Rosewater, Vonnegut wrote one of his often invoked quotes, which is spoken. This also gets me choked up. I'm very weepy about Kurt Vonnegut this week, you guys. This also gets me choked up and it's spoken in the book to a pair of infants by the titular character, Mr. Rosewater. And he says, Hello, babies.
34:30 Holly Frey? Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got 100 years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies. God damn it, you gotta be kind.
34:44 Speaker 05 After Rosewater, Vonnegut, who needed more money than his books were making, he took a job teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop. This turned out to be a pivotal move in his life. For the first time, he wasn't a solitary writer typing out his books at home. He was in the middle of a community of fellow writers, many of whom would become lifelong friends. He published a collection of short fiction titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. But the project he'd been working on since his return from the war finally, after many, many, many, many drafts, was published as a result of the work he did on it while in Iowa.
35:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, the outcome of Iowa is also one of those kind of funny things in his life because he didn't want to take a teaching job. He thought that was like admitting defeat as a writer, but it turned out to be really, really good for him. And that's why in 1969, he published Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade, which took his already impressive status in contemporary fiction to an absolutely new level. It was a New York Times bestseller. It won a National Book Award for Fiction, and it also made Kurt Vonnegut very famous very quickly.
35:53 Speaker 05 Slaughterhouse Five was incredibly popular, but it was also incredibly personal for Vonnegut. It's very clearly Vonnegut working through his experiences in World War II. The narrative jumps around through time and involves an alien race from the planet Tralfamador. But in its heart, it's Vonnegut sharing his experiences in Dresden. Even his main character, Billy Pilgrim, who he describes as unstuck in time, is born the same year as Vonnegut, 1922. He's also captured by the Germans in World War II and survives the bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut's nonlinear storytelling, which has Billy Pilgrim jumping from moment to moment in his life, gives away all the details that would normally be in a novel's final chapters in the early pages of the book.
36:35 Speaker 05 The narrative's message is anti-war, and many of the characters are inspired by people he knew during his time in service. All of the things he could never talk about with family and friends, including the trauma he felt, came out in the book. He even has an appearance in the book. He's in the boxcars and is watching some of these horrors play out. And it's interesting, reading the book and seeing him watch all of these horrors play out in third person, almost like he's disassociating out of it. While Vonnegut always insisted he was fine as these events were playing out in his actual life, Billy's story shows how deeply they haunted him decades later.
37:14 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's interesting. There's a moment in the documentary about him where he talks about trying to share some of it, like he had written some of it in his letter home, but he tries to tell his family about one of the things that happened, and he couldn't finish, and he was like, "I never talked about it again." Slaughterhouse Five, of course, made Vonnegut a critical and media darling and a household name. There's a great Life magazine feature on him and his family. It's this full spread with pictures, and it includes photos of his family and their home, and they're beautiful pictures. Some of them are really, really fun. But all of that fame, ultimately, as fame often does, led to his life blowing up. He moved from Cape Cod to New York. The family stayed in Cape Cod, and he and Jane
37:59 Holly Frey? split up. They had some fundamental differences, including religion, that had come into sharp focus once their kids were grown and moved out. But he had also met someone else. On the heels of his critically acclaimed novel, Vonnegut wrote a play titled Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and it was released in 1971. And while that play was in production, photographer Jill Kremmons was assigned to take pictures of him.
38:25 Speaker 05 The end of Jane and Kurt's marriage was somewhat unusual. They stayed in touch. Jane remained, according to her children, very proud of Kurt's accomplishments and accolades. While she could have easily become bitter over how things played out, she seemed to accept it and move on, eventually remarrying.
38:43 Holly Frey? Slaughterhouse-Five was option for film rights very soon after its release because of its popularity, and the movie version came out in 1972, starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim. The follow-up to Slaughterhouse-Five was greeted with less enthusiasm. His 1973 book Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, also has roots in Vonnegut's real life, as he examined what it is to be famous as a writer in a world where cultural norms and values are rapidly shifting. Kilgore Trout is a main character in this book, and it also echoes some of his earlier themes of free will and social inequity. Vonnegut also refers to himself in this book as a writer-narrator, sharing with the reader
39:28 Holly Frey? why he's doing some of the things he's doing with the story. This was, despite its critical reception, actually a bestseller, because at this point, the public adored Vonnegut. But some of the critics were really, really harsh in the way they received it.
39:43 Speaker 05 Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, was released in 1976. He dedicated the book to Laurel and Hardy, two men that he felt had taught him that laughter was okay even when things were tough. Though Slaughterhouse-Five is very much considered to be his loose biography, he states in the opening of Slapstick, "This is the closest I'll ever come to writing an autobiography." It's an autobiography of his main character, Dr. Wilbur "Daffodil" Eleven Swain. Swain has a sister, Eliza, and the siblings have been cut off from the world because they are, according to Swain's account, hideously ugly. But they're also uniquely powerful as a duo, and they wish to help people form extended families to eradicate loneliness. Critics didn't like it. And to be honest, Vonnegut didn't either.
40:27 Speaker 05 In his book Palm Sunday, he assigns letter grades to all of his books, and this is the only one he gave an F to. And the movie adaptation that Jerry Lewis made is probably one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my entire life. If you can find it, I had to buy a bootleg from Australia and then make my computer think it was Australian to watch it. It was a big rigmarole because I couldn't find it in the US at all.
40:58 Holly Frey? That's the universe telling you not to watch that film.
41:01 Speaker 05 That's actually, you are not the first person who told me that. But if you can find it, watch it because it is a horror show.
41:09 Holly Frey? Watch it because it's so bad. In 1979, Kurt married Jill, and they adopted an infant daughter named Lily together. And that pair stayed together for the rest of Kurt Vonnegut's life, although, like any long-term marriage, it was not always smooth. That same year, Kurt published the book Jailbird, a memoir of a man recently released from prison. It did better than Slapstick did with critics, but it also marked the start of a run of books that were seen as kind of okay rather than brilliant in most critics' eyes. So this includes that group of books that have Dead Eye Dick in 1982, Galapagos in 1985, and another fictional autobiography in 1987 titled Bluebeard.
41:53 Speaker 05 In his 1990 book, Hocus Pocus, it offered up the idea of a book crafted from scraps of paper that had been found assembled, according to the numbers written on them by their author. Vonnegut said that he wanted to prove that books could be written by anyone, and so he alleged, and I've always wondered if this is actually true, and he was handing receipts and things to his editor or not, but that anybody could write something, and he was writing it on the backs of grocery bags and things like that, but who knows. It features a recurrence of the Trelphamidorians. In 1991, Vonnegut published a collection of essays titled Fate's Worse Than Death, and
42:34 Speaker 05 in it, he confessed that he'd tried to die by suicide in 1984.
42:39 Holly Frey? Vonnegut's 1997 book, Timequake, invokes the trouble that he often had when grappling with a narrative, and makes it essential to the plot of the book. The conceit of the story is that in 2001, everybody gets thrust backwards 10 years to 1991, and they have to repeat those years all over again, but exactly as they played out the first time.
43:02 Speaker 05 The medicine to fix that book is great. It's just Kilgore Trout running around yelling at people, "You were sick, but now you're well again, there's work to do." Vonnegut's fiction offered political commentary often, but in 2005, he produced a very overtly political book titled A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America. And this book was a surprise hit. I don't know why it was a surprise, I bought a copy. And Vonnegut made the rounds of TV talk shows, talking about his disdain for the war in the Middle East. He noted that when he saw images of young Iraqi soldiers being marched with their hands on their heads as prisoners of war, he recognized the exact thing he'd lived through in Germany, and he felt a brotherhood with them.
43:45 Holly Frey? Even into his 80s, Vonnegut retained his wonderful dark humor. In a lecture he gave at Case Western Reserve in 2004, he made an announcement. "Here's the big news: I am suing Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company of Louisville, Kentucky, for billions, I hope. And you lawyers here, those in law school, will be interested in this case, I think." I have never smoked anything but Pall Mall since I was 11 years old. This is a Brown and Williamson product. On their package for several years now, they've promised to kill me, but I'm still alive. 81 years old. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. He told this story on numerous occasions, including in an interview with Rolling Stone
44:28 Holly Frey? and a couple of years later, I think that came out in 2006. And in that version, he claimed that he started smoking as a teenager rather than at 11. I don't know why he changed that detail.
44:39 Speaker 05 He probably thought it was funnier.
44:41 Holly Frey? That he started smoking as later?
44:43 Speaker 05 I don't know. Like, it's interesting when you see his genesis of how he tells stories in person.
44:47 Holly Frey? Yeah.
44:47 Speaker 05 It's always because he thinks he's getting a funnier punchline out of it or something. It wasn't cigarettes that caused Vonnegut's death. It was simply a fall. He'd fallen in his home in 2007, sustained brain injuries, and he died on April 11th, 2007.
45:04 Holly Frey? After his death, a renewed demand for his work led to several new releases. In 2008, Armageddon in Retrospect was released by his son Mark. And this brings together both fiction and nonfiction short-form pieces that examine the human propensity for war.
45:21 Speaker 05 Two more books of previously unpublished short fiction came out in the next several years. The first was Look at the Birdie in 2009, and the second was While Mortals Sleep, released two years later.
45:32 Holly Frey? His final writing, which was an unfinished novel and only a very small portion of one that he was working on when he died, was published in 2012 in a book that also included another novella that had never been published. These two works together were titled We Are What We Pretend to Be.
45:49 Speaker 05 Pertinent to where we are today, Vonnegut often said he trusted his writing best when he sounded like a person from Indianapolis. He also said of his body of work, quote, "If you were to bother to read my books to behave as educated persons would, you'd learn that they're not sexy and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are."
46:16 Holly Frey? And that is Kurt Vonnegut, who we both clearly love.
46:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:21 Holly Frey? And I still get choked up over. Thank you once again to Brian Young for doing that episode with me. It was really, really lovely to have him by my side for it. He loves Kurt Vonnegut in much the same way I do, and he is a wealth of knowledge about him, so it was a perfect fit.
46:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Do you have any listener mail before we wrap up?
46:40 Holly Frey? No.
46:41 Tracy V. Wilson? All right.
46:46 Holly Frey? I will even say, since that was kind of a juicy live show, I'm going to forego listener mail this time around, and we will have some next time around, I promise.
46:56 Tracy V. Wilson? All righty.
46:57 Holly Frey? If you would like to write to the show, though, in the meantime, so you could potentially be a future listener mail, you can do that at [email protected] . You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
47:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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48:01 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio and Partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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