American · 1922–2007
Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, then spent twenty-three years finding a way to write about it. "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969) finally cracked the problem by refusing to solve it—Billy Pilgrim comes "unstuck in time," and the massacre appears in fragments, approached but never quite faced. The American writer's voice—deadpan, humane, corrosive—made him a counterculture icon, but his formal inventiveness deserves equal attention. He blended science fiction with literary fiction, drawings with prose, autobiography with fantasy. "So it goes" became his epitaph for the dead, and eventually his own.