Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1913 – 2007) was a prolific writer whose most prominent work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), is based on his personal experiences as a prisoner of war trapped in the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II. He then wrote many more novels, of which Breakfast of Champions (1973) was the most commercially successful though not as acclaimed by critics.
Vonnegut described himself as an atheist,[1] and in 1992 won the "Humanist of the Year" award.[2] He attributed his atheism to having studied anthropology.
Vonnegut's contempt for Christianity did not stop him from roundly mocking evolution in his novel Galapagos, which described the "evolution" of humans into seal-like creatures and their increased happiness in their evolution into lesser creatures. This rejection of the evolutionist view of of humans as the zenith of their tree of life, shows how he still realized how bankrupt the ideas of evolution were, despite his atheism.
Of German descent, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II in 1944. Taken to Germany as a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was then stuck in an underground meat locker with his fellow prisoners during the firebombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945. 135,000 Germans died in that attack, the same number who perished when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Afterwards, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were left to dig corpses out of the ruins. The phrase "so it goes" is used throughout Slaughterhouse-Five when discussing death.
Robert Scholes gave this review of the Slaughterhouse-Five in the New York Times Book Review:[3]
- Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them. ... Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.
Vonnegut's timing was perfect, as America in 1969 was struggling with the Vietnam War and other issues relevant to the book, such as ecology, consumerism and claims of overpopulation.
Vonnegut's last book, Man Without a Country is a scathing criticism of the Bush administration and current U.S. foreign policy.
Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 from brain injuries he received in a fall almost five weeks earlier.
References
- ↑ Some question whether Kurt Vonnegut was an atheist. He has described himself as a "secular humanist," and the majority of secular humanists are atheist or agnostic.
- ↑ http://www.celebatheists.com/index.php?title=Kurt_Vonnegut_Jr.
- ↑ http://www.vonnegutweb.com/sh5/index.html