Kurt Vonnegut, end of an American literary giant

A renowned Indianapolis literary personality, Kurt Vonnegut, died Wednesday at age of 84. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz said he had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home two weeks ago.

Indianapolis mourned the death of a native son and a literary legend. The author’s writing was am amalgamation of satire and fantasy, the humor he depicted usually mocked the capacity of human beings to destroy. He had been called as a representative writer of the post world war era.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis, he grew up in a prominent family, his father was an architect and his mother was the daughter of a billionaire, Brewer Albert Lieber. He graduated from the Shortridge High School and later attended Cornell University, he enlisted voluntarily for the war in 1943, and after the war he attended the Chicago University to pursue his MA degree in Anthropology.

In 1945, he married his childhood sweetheart. Jane Marie Coax. They had a son and two daughters. In 1958, his sister and her husband died, therefore, Kurt Vonnegut and his wife adopted their four children. He got divorced in 1979 and re-married Jill Krementz the same year.

“Slaughterhouse Five” was one of his best literary works and considered to be his masterpiece. This novel was based on his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden Germany, 1945. Apart from the “Slaughterhouse Five”, “Cat’s Craddle” and “The Sirens of Titan” were also amongst his notable works. Many critics labeled him as a science fiction writer, whereas, the writer himself said that he only wrote about humans and machines. Black humor was a very prominent attribute in his writings.

Editor of In These Times, Joel Bleifuss said, "He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important."

In 2005, he had a best-seller with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration and the doubtful future of the planet.

Kurt said that the book's success is "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

Apart from writing novels, Kurt Vonnegut also wrote essays, TV plays and critiques. His last novels included “Timequake” and “If God were Alive Today”. His last literary works received mixed sort of feedback from his readers, most of them though that he kept churning out the same sort of ideas.

Tragedy was a persistent trait in his life, his mother committed suicide in 1944. He himself battled depression throughout his life and even tried to attempt suicide with pills and alcohol in 1984, and also talked about it several times in his life.

Kurt Vonnegut was a pessimist by nature and this characteristic in him grew more with time and in his later years.

On January 2000, Kurt Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation due to a fire break out in his Manhattan townhouse.