picked him up, and stuffed him in a trash can somewhere in the [school] building. I know all this only secondhand, Kurt never told me, but it was common knowledge. It was no lighthearted joke but seemed to fester with time, because it surfaced at our fiftieth reunion.” Two of the “jocks” of the class opposed having Vonnegut give the main speech at

Your pleasant note of so long ago bobbed to the surface of the paper dunes in my disaster area of an office. I

Maxim Gorky

I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare.

E. M. Forster’s rule: “Only connect!”

bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are 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.

You were a master when I first met you, and masters do not grow. They simply work. So you will never get any news of your having grown from me. Growth is for apprentices. I welcome anything you do. Just now, I would especially welcome your poetry. Personally, I prefer your smaller works, just as I prefer smaller Vermeers. But that way lies

Vonnegut “… uses the rhetorical potential of the short sentence and the short paragraph better than anyone now writing, often getting a rich comic or dramatic effect by isolating a single sentence in a separate paragraph or excerpting a phrase from context for a bizarre chapter-heading. The apparent simplicity and ordinariness of his writing masks

Unsettling business for an artist, where everything that happens in New York has universality, and everything that happens outside is ethnography.