In the summer of 1965, a telephone rang at a failing car dealership on Cape Cod. The man who answered was forty-three, flat broke, and supporting six children by writing paperback science fiction that almost no one in the literary world took seriously. He had no idea that the voice on the other end of the line was about to change everything — not just for him, but for American literature…
The man who answered was Kurt Vonnegut.
Today his name belongs to the ages. Slaughterhouse-Five sits on nearly every list of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and generations have grown up on Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, on his gallows humor and his aching humanity. But in the summer of 1965, none of that had happened yet. Kurt Vonnegut was, by almost every measure the world uses, a failure.
He was scraping by, out of print, running a Saab dealership in West Barnstable that didn’t work, trying to feed a very large family on royalties that barely existed. And the reason that family was so large is a story of almost unimaginable loss.
Because the truth is that Kurt Vonnegut had already lived through more grief by 1965 than most people face in a lifetime.
In December 1944, at twenty-two, he was captured by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner in Dresden. On the night of February 13, 1945, he survived the Allied firebombing that destroyed the city — locked deep underground in a meat locker beneath the slaughterhouse where his captors kept the American POWs. He climbed up into daylight the next morning to find the beautiful city above him simply gone. Then he and the other prisoners were put to work, for weeks, pulling bodies from the ruins.
He carried that with him for the rest of his life.
And the war was not the only sorrow he came home to. While he was still a young soldier, before he shipped overseas, his mother had died — a tragedy that shadowed him always. Years later, in 1958, his beloved older sister Alice died of cancer in a hospital, just two days after her husband was killed in a train accident. In a single, unbearable stretch, four young boys were left without parents. Kurt and his wife, Jane, did not hesitate. They adopted three of Alice’s orphaned sons — and just like that, their household of three children became a household of six.
He loved those children. But love does not pay the bills. And for twenty years, Vonnegut had also been carrying something else: a book he could not write.
Ever since the war, he had been trying to write about Dresden — and every time, it fell apart in his hands. The horror was too big, too shapeless, to force into an ordinary war story. “When I got home from the Second World War,” he later said, “I thought it would be easy to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be report what I had seen.” He was wrong. For two decades, the book would not come.
And then, in 1965, the phone rang at that failing car dealership.
On the line was a message from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — the oldest and most prestigious creative writing program in America. They needed someone to fill a last-minute teaching vacancy. Would Kurt Vonnegut come to Iowa City and teach fiction, for a salary of eight thousand five hundred dollars a year?
Vonnegut, who by his own admission “needed the job most desperately,” said yes.
So he packed up his family and drove west, and this obscure paperback writer — pipe smoke, rumpled manner, Indiana drawl, and a bottomless well of unprocessed war — walked into a room full of the most serious young writers in the country. And for the first time in his life, people took him seriously. He had literary company, a small office, and students who hung on his every word.
He turned out to be a magnificent teacher.
Among the students who passed through his classroom in those two years was a young man named John Irving — who would go on to write The World According to Garp. Irving later summed up his teacher in a line everyone who knew Vonnegut came back to: he was “cruel to institutions, but kind to the individuals.” He taught Gail Godwin, and Suzanne McConnell, who would remain his devoted friend for life. He gave writing advice his students could still recite, word for word, forty years later.
And in Iowa City, with a little breathing room at last, Kurt Vonnegut finally cracked the book that had defeated him for twenty years.
The breakthrough was letting go of the idea that it had to be told in a straight line. Memory doesn’t work that way, he realized — not when the thing being remembered is too enormous to hold. So he handed the story to a hapless optometrist named Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes “unstuck in time” and lurches, without warning, back and forth through the moments of his own life. That strange, broken, time-jumping structure was the key. He began the novel at Iowa, and after winning a Guggenheim grant in 1967, he traveled back to Dresden itself to research it, and finished it at home.
Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. Kurt Vonnegut was forty-six years old.
It made him famous almost overnight. Landing in the middle of the Vietnam War, in front of a country desperate to understand what war does to those who survive it, the book struck like a lightning bolt. The paperback writer the literary world had spent twenty years ignoring was suddenly one of the most important novelists in America — and he stayed there for the rest of his life.
He wrote fourteen novels in all. But through all of them, and through all his dark humor and his despair at the cruelty of the world, he kept returning to one simple piece of advice that he believed mattered more than any clever technique or turn of phrase. It has been taped to refrigerators and read aloud at weddings and funerals ever since:
“God damn it,” he wrote, “you’ve got to be kind.”
Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-four, after a fall. His former students — Irving, McConnell, and a whole generation of American writers who had passed through that Iowa classroom — wrote about him with enormous love.
And when you trace it all the way back, the bridge that carried him out of obscurity and into the ranks of the immortals was one desperate yes to a phone call. A broke, grieving, middle-aged man with six kids and a book he couldn’t finish, who said yes to eighty-five hundred dollars a year — and, in saying it, finally found the room to write the story he’d been carrying since he was twenty-two.
Sometimes the thing that saves a life doesn’t look like salvation at the time. Sometimes it looks like a modest teaching job in Iowa, taken because the bills were due. And sometimes that’s exactly where a masterpiece — and a second life — quietly begins.