Kurt Vonnegut

“Vonnegut, in his fiction, is doing what the most serious writers always do. He is helping, in Joyce’s phrase, ‘to create the conscience of the race.’ What race? Human certainly, not American or German or any other abstraction from humanity. Just as pure romance provides us with necessary psychic exercise, intellectual comedy like Vonnegut’s

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

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

saved and passed on to me this assignment, explaining that Kurt “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.”

There is also a foreshadowing of his future style in the understated dark irony of the grim events he reports and his own survival. “But not me … but not me” seems later to echo in the phrase that would famously be repeated in much of his published work: “So it goes …”

At several points you wrote so well that I was moved to protest: Let’s leave the writing to the writers, Scholes. If you don’t know how a critic is supposed to write, I commend to your attention The Tragic Vision.

Nothing came easy for him. Nothing deterred him—not the many editors and publishers who rejected his books and stories; not the anthropology department of the University of Chicago, which rejected not one but two of the theses he wrote for his M.A. degree (awarding it to him only after he was famous); not the Guggenheim Foundation, which rejected h

not the bureaucrats he battled for the rights of writers throughout the world; not the right-wing Christian religious groups that condemned this man who described Jesus Christ as “the greatest and most humane of human beings.” Anyone who imagines a writer’s life has ever been easy—even one who eventually achieves fame and fortune—will be disabused

I’ve started several books since the last one, and they’ve all poohed out. If I got a grip on myself, made myself be a little soldier about them, I suppose I could finish them all. But that’s fetishism, I think, writing books to write books. Right now I’m working on a novella that pleases