Sublime

they make you think, raise your spirits, evoke your anger at injustice, make you see things in new ways, question society’s “accepted wisdom,” and, always, entertain. Vonnegut’s heroes included the

he said.

Algren, and Bourjaily, and was very taken by my best student, Ian MacMillan. He promised to do his best to get Harper’s Magazine to publish something of Ian’s. You ask me to tell you of any good students in my

out

Vonnegut “uses the rhetorical potential of the short sentence and 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 mask its eff

“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

“I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’”

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course.

"The end of the Rosewater family is now plainly in view." "There