A great writer is gone. At least he was great for me. If you haven't, read him. Then his voice will still be heard.

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island. His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago. Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States. Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.” Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment. His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says). The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

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update:

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
We Join Kilgore Trout in Mourning

Although I re-read both of the above books every couple of years, the Vonnegut novel that I favor the most is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The story of Eliot Rosewater, a WW II veteran who is also the scion of a wealthy industrialist, this novel might be Vonnegut's most pointed piece of social criticism. The protagonist follows the road expected of him after his military service--he finishes college, marries properly and joins the family business. Then he has an epiphany and decides to use his share of the family fortunes to help out the hopeless. He sets up a philanthropic office in a small town in Indiana and gives away money to anyone who asks for it. The Foundation's slogan is "Don't kill yourself, call the Rosewater Foundation." A family lawyer wants to get Eliot declared insane in order to get the money in someone else's hands. Yet that is a mere subplot. The real story is about human redemption and Eliot's belief that almost everyone has some good in them. Interspersed throughout the book are incisive critiques of the history and nature of US capitalism. Yet, it is a very funny novel. Kurt Vonnegut's insights will be missed. It's not that no one else had or will have insights like those of Mr. Vonnegut. It's just not that likely that anyone will ever deliver them with such humor and humanity. He is already missed. Po-tee-weet.

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another update:

Peace Be With You, Mr. Vonnegut
The Novelist Who Hated War

As the media fills with whimsical good-byes to one of America's greatest writers, lets not forget one of the great engines driving this wonderful man---he HATED war. Including this one in Iraq. And he had utter contempt for the men who brought it about. Kurt Vonnegut was a divine spark of liberating genius for an entire generation. His brilliant, beautiful, loving and utterly unfettered novels helped us redefine ourselves in leaving the corporate America in the 1950s and the Vietnam war that followed. Having seen the worst of World War II from a meatlocker in fire-bombed Dresden, Kurt's Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle:, Slaughterhouse Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, cut us the intellectual and spiritual slack to seek out a new reality. It took a breathtaking psychic freedom to merge the interstellar worlds he created from whole cloth with the social imperatives of a changing age. It was that combination of talent, heart and liberation that gave Vonnegut a cutting edge he never lost. Leaving us in his eighties, Kurt also leaves us decades of anecdotes and volumes of writings---and doodlings---about which to write. But lost in the mainstream obituaries---including the one in the New York Times---is the ferocity with which he opposed this latest claque of vicious war-mongers.

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