So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut dies.

1922-2007

If you were a reader in the 1960's and 70's you probably read "Slaughterhouse Five." It was a reading experience that is not forgotten. The Boston Globe highlights the event that inspired the work of his life. If you have somehow missed reading the book, you owe it to yourself to do so.

[...]

Mr. Vonnegut's best-known work, "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), drew on his experience as a prisoner of war at the end of World War II. Like Mr. Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim, the novel's hero, survives the fire-bombing of Dresden by Allied forces in February 1945. Billy then travels to another planet, Tralfamadore, where he is able to see all time. "So it goes," the novel's refrain, became a popular catchphrase, initially with protesters of the Vietnam War. Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein.

"He was sort of like nobody else," Gore Vidal told the Associated Press early this morning. "He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side.

"Kurt was never dull."

Born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Mr. Vonnegut was educated in public schools there. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. She suffered from mental illness.

"When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information," Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide. Later in his life, Mr. Vonnegut would suffer from depression, including a severe bout after the publication and success of "Slaughterhouse-Five."

In 1940, Mr. Vonnegut entered Cornell University to study biochemistry. His interest in writing led him to journalism, and he became a columnist and editor of the school paper. "I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year," he later recalled. "I was delighted to join the Army and go to war."

While serving as an infantry scout during the Battle of the Bulge, he was captured by the Germans and put to work in a Dresden factory.

In the sort of surreal detail that would often figure in his fiction, Mr. Vonnegut survived the bombing of the city only because he was on a work detail in a refrigerated meat locker three stories beneath the ground. Following the raids, Mr. Vonnegut was put to work retrieving bodies and removing valuables. "One hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground," he noted once in an interview. "It was a terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt."

[...]

IMO none of his other works compared to "Slaughterhouse Five."