Kurt Vonnegut

<p>Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. While studying biochemistry at Cornell University, he enlisted in the United States Army during World War II. Deployed to the European theater, Private Vonnegut was captured by German troops during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dresden.</p>
<p>In February 1945, Vonnegut survived the cataclysmic Allied firebombing of Dresden by hiding underground in an underground meat locker called <em>Schlachthof Fünf</em> (Slaughterhouse Five). Assigned as a POW to recover thousands of incinerated corpses from city cellars, the incomprehensible horror of mass destruction became the traumatic crucible that informed his artistic life. It took Vonnegut twenty-five years to find the satirical, time-traveling, and nonlinear narrative form capable of confronting that trauma, resulting in his 1969 masterpiece <em>Slaughterhouse-Five</em>.</p>
<p>With an unmistakable blend of deadpan irony, deep empathy, and the fatalistic refrain 'So it goes', Vonnegut captured the zeitgeist of the Vietnam War generation. In books such as <em>Cat's Cradle</em> (1963) and <em>Breakfast of Champions</em> (1973), he skewered corporate greed, technological arrogance, and religious dogma, always championing simple human kindness as civilization's sole redeeming grace.</p>