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Kurt Vonnegut

Novelist and essayist

United States · 1922–2007

Arts and letters

About

American novelist whose books include Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. He was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945, the experience that Slaughterhouse-Five draws on.

reference

1 answer

Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? Failure & regret read 77 other answers →

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

Recorded George Plimpton, David Hayman, David Michaelis and Richard Rhodes, The Paris Review, issue 69, Spring 1977, 1 January 1977 source ↗

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