By 1976, the year that Kurt Vonnegut published his eighth novel, Slapstick, it was apparent that the author of Slaughterhouse-Five was more than a favorite of the sixties’ counterculture, more than an acidly witty public personality and a gadfly of the military-industrial complex—more, even, than one of America’s most widely read living writers. Out of the sweeping spotlight of popular success emerged the enduring Vonnegut: a satiric fabulist to rival Mark Twain, a comic storyteller whose books are as morally serious as they are imaginative and amusing. With the four novels collected here Vonnegut was recognized as an original American classic, the architect of an oeuvre built to last, a body of work tightly joined and cleanly made, designed along lines entirely his own. This third volume in the Library of America’s definitive edition of his fiction opens with Slapstick, the memoirs of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a hundred-year-old former president of the United States and the promulgator of an ingenious national program to stamp out “American loneliness.” By giving every citizen a new middle name, President Swain, himself assigned to the computer-generated Daffodil clan, also gives them a numberless network of concerned “relatives”—a taste of the familial bliss that Swain once enjoyed with his twin sister, Eliza, his soulmate and missing half, now dead beneath an avalanche on Mars. Jailbird (1979) is a political memoir of a less fantastic sort, chronicling the misadventures of Walter F. Starbuck, a once-idealistic government functionary who, through no wrongdoing of his own, has become embroiled in every major national scandal from Sacco and Vanzetti to Watergate. Deadeye Dick (1982) is the story of a talentless playwright’s lifelong struggle to atone for the accidental crimes of his youth, the foolishness of his father, and the sins of his country. And in Galápagos (1985), a favorite of the author’s among his books, a ghost from the future reveals how and why a million years ago—during the global ecological disaster of 1986—humankind abandoned the land for the sea and embarked upon an unlikely evolution. The volume is rounded out with an assortment of Vonnegut rarities: speeches, essays, and commentary that touch upon the themes and particulars of these novels.
Author
Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003. He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II. After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his reporting work. His experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. This acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as "Vonnegutian" in scope. Vonnegut was a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The novelist is known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973)
