Reflecting on his own death, there are a few things Vonnegut might have to say. "So it goes," the refrain from his 1969 novel Slaughter-House Five whenever death or mortality are mentioned might be one, the other would likely be the quote from page 66 of A Man Without a Country that he desired for his epitaph: "The only proof he needed / For the existence of God / Was music." But the one thing that he hoped others would say about him after his death was this:
"Kurt is up in Heaven now."
As a humanist, Vonnegut considered this a profoundly funny joke.
Early Life
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis Indiana on November 11, 1922. The Vonnegut family was already well established in Indiana at this time, having lived there for several generations, as Vonnegut traces in his book Palm Sunday. Vonnegut spent his formative years growing up during the Great Depression. He attended public school, and later Cornell University until at age nineteen he was drafted into the US armed forces to fight in World War Two.
War and Dresden
Serving in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge, Vonnegut, along with members of his platoon were lost behind enemy lines and captured on December 14th 1944. It was as a POW that Vonnegut had a life changing experience that would inform much of his later artistic career, and indeed the arc of his life. On February 13-15 1945, Vonnegut and a handful of fellow POWs witnessed first-hand the firebombing of Dresden which razed the city to the ground and killed virtually all it's citizens. Attempting to write about that experience was a process that would take him nearly twenty years, and culminate in the novel largely regarded as his masterpiece, Slaughter-House Five.
Post-War Life
After being freed at the end of the war, Vonnegut returned to the states on May 22nd 1945. he married his high school sweetheart Jane Marie Cox and the two settled in Chicago where Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago and studied for an MA in Anthropology but dropped out after his thesis was rejected. He moved with his wife to Schenectaday, NY and went to work for General Electric in their public relations department. Vonnegut's older brother Bernard worked at GE as a researcher. Vonnegut began writing fiction at this time, and his first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," was published in February 1950. According to Jerome Klinkowitz, in Vonnegut in America, a year after publishing his first short story, Vonnegut quit his job at General Electric and moved to Provincetown, Massachussetts with his family to write full-time.
