AUTHOR Kurt Vonnegut is famous for his satirical and black humor bestsellers, but he is perhaps best-known for his writings drawing inspiration from his service during WWII. Vonnegut enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor rather than wait to be drafted. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, survived a train bombing that killed 150 of his fellow servicemen, and then was kept as a POW in a Dresden, Germany, slaughterhouse—the source for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. During the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden, he took refuge in a cold underground meat locker. With the city largely destroyed, he was forced to excavate bodies from the rubble. Vonnegut downplayed his Purple Heart’s significance, claiming he got it for frostbite. But he did reference it in a 1967 letter to the Massachusetts draft board in support of his son Mark’s conscientious objector status during Vietnam and again in 1971 defending Slaughterhouse to a school board that wanted to ban it.
Vintage: 1945
Resides in the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
