Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

With a career spanning 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most prolific and popular American writers of the 20th century. Though his works have often met with mixed reviews, and have been difficult to categorize, his status of cultural icon and one of the most important contemporary novelists is well established. This critical companion, perfect for students, skillfully guides readers through seven of Vonnegut's most important novels including Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). A full chapter is devoted to each work, with clear analysis of plot, character development, thematic concerns, symbolism, and a close critical reading. A chapter on the life of Kurt Vonnegut gives an up-to-date biography, with interesting details relating the facts of his life to his writings. The Literary Contexts section, devoted to examining issues of genre, influences, and themes in Vonnegut's writing, adds to a fuller understanding of the man and his literary works.

Since the publication of his first short stories in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut has enjoyed much popular acclaim and has, since the 1970s, gained growing amounts of attention from the scholarly community. In the course of his career, he has become increasingly concerned with visual images. While such imagery occurs in his short fiction and novels, he has also written plays, in which ideas are visually represented on the stage. In recent years, he has devoted more and more of his time and energy to graphic art, producing paintings that are then silk screened. The contributors to this volume look at the visual images created by Vonnegut in his literary art, along with the images and representations of his thought that increasingly are being brought to life in other media.

Kurt Vonnegut's career as a novelist encompasses virtually the whole second half of the twentieth century, and his novels are among the most widely read in America. Yet Vonnegut enjoyed another successful career as a short story writer. His short fiction brought him much acclaim in the early years of his writing career and made him visible to a very large audience. His stories were illustrated by some of the best artists in the business and were featured prominently in leading magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Argosy. By examining Vonnegut's short fiction, this study illuminates his development as an author and contributes to a better understanding of the entire canon of his works.

Since 1950, when his short stories first appeared, Kurt Vonnegut has published almost 50 short stories, 13 novels, two plays, and a teleplay. He has remained one of the most important chroniclers of American life. Yet he occupies an ambiguous place in American letters. Following three interviews with Vonnegut, the 14 essays in this collection seek to chronicle his career as it moves through changing times. The essays either focus on Vonnegut's later work or are retrospectives reevaluating aspects of his literary career. Some are on individual works, particularly later novels, but most consider the ways Vonnegut pursues a theme or technique.

". . . clear and illuminating—Berryman is . . . one of the finest essayists of the contemporary scene to show up in print over the last decade."—STUDIES IN THE NOVEL

"An addendum to W. M. Frohock's 'The Novel of Violence in America, 1920-1950' (1950), Shaw's volume further defines violence and provides lengthy essays on a novel by each of eight authors not covered by Frohock—Porter, Capote. Vonnegut, Doctorow, McCarthy, Morrison, Selby, and Ellis. . . . Students and scholars dealing with any of the writers Shaw covers will appreciate his detailed essays on specific novels. Recommended for libraries supporting coursework in the modern novel at the upper-division undergraduate level and above."—Choice