Look up story or stories in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Story or Stories may refer to:

• Story, a recounting of a sequence of events
• Narrative
• Story (surname)
• Story, or storey, a floor or level of a building
• Stories, colloquial, US American expression for soap operas

Media[link]

• Story (magazine), an American literary magazine published 1931–1961 and 1989–2000
• The Story with Dick Gordon, a radio interview program that debuted in 2006
• Story, one of the main characters in the 2006 film Lady in the Water
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, a screenwriting guide by Robert McKee.

Music[link]

Artists

• The Story (UK band), an English psych-folk band 2002-present
• Stories (band), an early 1970s American rock group
• The Story (band), an early 1990s folk-rock duo

Albums

• Story (Amorphis album), compilation, 2000
• The Story (Brandi Carlile album), 2007
• Story (Eric Clapton album), compilation, 1991
• A Story, 1997 album by Yoko Ono, recorded in 1974
• Stories (Mayumi Iizuka album), 2008
• Stories (Addison Road album), 2010
• Stories (Gloria Gaynor album), 1980
• Stories (A Narada Artist Collection), 1998 compilation
• Stories (Randy Stonehill album), compilation
• The Story, 2006 album by Bizzy Bone
• Story, 1970 album by Honeybus

Songs

• "The Story" (song), 2007, by Brandi Carlile from her album The Story
• "Story" (Leddra Chapman song), 2009 single
• "Stories" (Boney M. song), 1990 single
• "Stories" (Therapy? song), 1995 single
• "Stories", a song from Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas
• "The Story", song by 30 Seconds to Mars from their album A Beautiful Lie
• "Story", B-side of the "Makes Me Wonder" single by Maroon 5

People with given name Story[link]

• Story Musgrave (born 1935), American doctor and astronaut
• Story Tweedie-Yates (born 1983), professional American tennis player

Places[link]

• Story, Indiana, United States
• Story, Wyoming, United States
• Story City, Iowa, United States
• Story County, Iowa, United States
• Fort Story, a sub-installation of the United States Navy and Little Creek Amphibious Base
• Story, Arkansas, United States

See also[link]

Wikiversity has learning materials about Story

• Storey (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ( /ˈvɒnɨɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was a 20th century American writer.^[2] His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical leftist intellectual.^[3] He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.^[4]

Life[link]

Early years[link]

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and Edith Lieber.^[5] Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut, Sr. was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis institution.^[6] Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated into Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun.^[7] He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army.^[8] The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.^[2]

On Mothers' Day in 1944, when Vonnegut was 21, his mother committed suicide with sleeping pills.^[9]

World War II[link]

Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..."^[10] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away.^[11] While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.^[12]

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.^[11] Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."^[13]

Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border.^[11] Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,"^[14][15] later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".^[16]

Post-war career[link]

After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time."^[17] Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them.^{[citation needed]} According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was "unprofessional." He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer, but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, located within the town of Glenville, just across the Mohawk River from the city of Schenectady. Vonnegut rented an upstairs apartment located along Alplaus Creek across the street from the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department, where he was an active Volunteer Fire-Fighter for a few years. To this day, the apartment where Vonnegut lived for a brief time still has a desk at which he wrote many of his short stories; Vonnegut carved his name on its underside. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.^[18][19]

In the mid-1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and left.^[20] On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine^[21] and the Modern Library.^[22]

Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod,^[23] where he managed the first Saab dealership established in the U.S.^[24]

Personal life[link]

The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.

After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970. He did not divorce Cox until 1979, but from 1970 Vonnegut lived with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz.^[2] Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.

He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer;^[25] and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote two books, one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery, and one which includes anecdotes of growing up as his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, and what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.^[26]

His daughter Edith "Edie", an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book titled Domestic Goddesses and was once married to Geraldo Rivera. His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny"), was named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose".

Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother—Kurt's sister Alice—died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer and actress.

Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky^[27] and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.^[28]

A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide".^[29] On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut.^[30]

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.^[2][31][32]

Writing career[link]

Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect"^[33] appeared in the February 11, 1950 edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959.^[34] Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a Master's Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device.

These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself, as a deus ex machina.

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.

"I know," I said.

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said.

Deadeye Dick, although mostly set in the mid-20th century, foreshadows the turbulent times of contemporary America; it ends prophetically with the lines "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet." The novel explores themes of social isolation and alienation that are particularly relevant in the postmodern world. Society is seen as openly hostile or indifferent at best, and popular culture as superficial and excessively materialistic.

Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984 and later wrote about this in several essays.^[35]

Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.

In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused". In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.

In addition to recurring characters, there are also recurring themes and ideas. One of them is ice-nine (a central wampeter in his novel Cat's Cradle).

Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, in his seminal short story "Harrison Bergeron" egalitarianism is rigidly enforced by overbearing state authority, engendering horrific repression.

In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). It is characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "So it goes", used ironically in reference to death, also originated in Slaughterhouse-Five. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein."^[31]

With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor,^[36] until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U. S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.^[37]

An August 2006 article reported:

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today — or so he claims. "I've given up on it... It won't happen... The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"^[13]

The April 2008 issue of Playboy featured the first published excerpt from Armageddon in Retrospect, the first posthumous collection of Vonnegut's work. The book itself was published in the same month. It included never before published short stories by the writer and a letter that was written to his family during World War II when Vonnegut was captured as a prisoner of war. The book also contains drawings by Vonnegut and a speech he wrote shortly before his death. The introduction was written by his son, Mark Vonnegut.

Vonnegut also taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.^[38]

Art career[link]

Vonnegut's work as a graphic artist began with his illustrations for Slaughterhouse-Five and developed with Breakfast of Champions, which included numerous felt-tip pen illustrations. Later in his career, he became more interested in artwork, particularly silk-screen prints, which he pursued in collaboration with Joe Petro III.

In 2004, Vonnegut participated in the project The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were, for which he created an album cover for Phish called Hook, Line and Sinker, which has been included in a traveling exhibition for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Politics[link]

Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[39]

Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.

With his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."^[40][41] In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities,or 'PPs.'"^[42] When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."^[43]

He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."^[44]

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied, "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your Race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble—sweet and honourable I guess it is—to die for what you believe in." (This last statement is a reference to the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ["it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country"] from Horace's Odes, or possibly to Wilfred Owen's ironic use of the line in his Dulce Et Decorum Est.) Nason took offense at Vonnegut's comments and characterized him as an old man who "doesn't want to live any more ... and because he can't find anything worthwhile to keep him alive, he finds defending terrorists somehow amusing." Vonnegut's son, Mark, responded to the article by writing an editorial to the Boston Globe in which he explained the reasons behind his father's "provocative posturing" and stated that "If these commentators can so badly misunderstand and underestimate an utterly unguarded English-speaking 83-year-old man with an extensive public record of saying exactly what he thinks, maybe we should worry about how well they understand an enemy they can't figure out what to call."^[45]

A 2006 interview with Rolling Stone stated, " ... it's not surprising that he disdains everything about the Iraq War. The very notion that more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in what he sees as an unnecessary conflict makes him groan. 'Honestly, I wish Nixon were president,' Vonnegut laments. 'Bush is so ignorant.' "^[13]

Though he was a dissident to the end, Vonnegut held a bleak view on the power of artists to effect change. "During the Vietnam War," he told an interviewer in 2003, "every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."^[43]

Religion[link]

Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of "conventional religious beliefs."^[46] His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut had authored a freethought book titled Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him.^[47]

Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic,^[47] freethinker,^[48] humanist,^[48] Unitarian Universalist,^[49] agnostic,^[47] and atheist.^[50] He disbelieved in the supernatural,^[47] considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.^[51]

Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought,^[52] and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism.^[53] In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007.^[54] In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."^[55]

Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation.^[47][56] Palm Sunday reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book Fates Worse Than Death. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York.^[57] Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars.^[48] Vonnegut's parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and his son had at one time aspired to become a Unitarian minister.^[47]

Vonnegut's views on religion were unconventional and nuanced. While rejecting the divinity of Jesus,^[50] he was nevertheless an ardent admirer, and believed that Jesus's Beatitudes informed his own humanist outlook.^[58] While he often identified himself as an agnostic or atheist, he also frequently spoke of God.^[48] Despite describing freethought, humanism and agnosticism as his "ancestral religion," and despite being a Unitarian, he also spoke of himself as being irreligious.^[48] A press release by the American Humanist Association described him as "completely secular."^[55]

Self-assessment[link]

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O'Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that. He wrote an earlier version of writing tips that was even more straightforward and contained only seven rules (though it advised using Elements of Style for more indepth advice).

In "The Sexual Revolution", Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday, Vonnegut grades his own works. He states that the grades "do not place me in literary history" and that he is comparing "myself with myself." The grades are as follows:

• Player Piano: B
• The Sirens of Titan: A
• Mother Night: A
• Cat's Cradle: A-plus
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
• Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
• Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
• Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
• Breakfast of Champions: C
• Slapstick: D
• Jailbird: A
• Palm Sunday: C

Appearances[link]

• Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986's Back to School, in which he is hired by Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon's own, Professor Turner tells him, "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
• Vonnegut also made brief cameos in the film adaptations of his novels Mother Night and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night was directed by Keith Gordon, who starred as Dangerfield's son in Back to School.
• He made a guest appearance on the 2002 DVD released by 1 Giant Leap, leading the producers of the film to say, "Probably the most unbelievable result in our whole production was getting Kurt Vonnegut to agree to an interview". In the film, Vonnegut states, "Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference".
• Vonnegut narrates and wrote the narrative of two oratorios with composer Dave Soldier recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, A Soldier's Story based on the execution of Private Eddie Slovik and Ice-9 Ballads, adapted from Cat's Cradle.
• Vonnegut recorded a number of first-person voice-overs for Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War and included one of a young soldier reflecting on a visit with a prostitute.
• Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 dramatic documentary The American Ruling Class playing himself.
• Vonnegut appears briefly in the 2005 Dutch release of the three part BBC documentary D-Day to Berlin. The allies journey to victory, telling about his memories of the bombing of Dresden
• In August 2006, Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed on the national, weekly public radio program, The Infinite Mind, from inside the 3-D virtual on-line community Second Life. The program made broadcast history^[59] as the first to be taped inside a virtual world, and it was the author's last face-to-face sit-down interview. The host was The Infinite Mind's John Hockenberry, who was with Vonnegut in the studio as the program was taped. Vonnegut's virtual interview was taped in front of a virtual audience of 100 people from around the world at the 16-acre (65,000 m²) virtual broadcast center created by producer Bill Lichtenstein and Lichtenstein Creative Media^[60] which produces The Infinite Mind.
• In 2007 Vonnegut is featured in the film Never Down as Robert and appears in several scenes.

Tributes[link]

• A sort of anti-tribute appears in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Inferno, which is set in Dante's Hell. The protagonist, a version of Niven himself, encounters Vonnegut's tomb in the city of Dis; another character theorizes it is punishment for Vonnegut's satire of religion in several of his stories. The protagonist utters bitter criticism of Vonnegut's talent, but it is not clear whether it should be seen as actual criticism of Vonnegut or of the character's own ego.
• The 2009 Hollywood adaptation of Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", a film entitled 2081 is dedicated "To Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."
• At the annual Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library McFadden Memorial Lecture at Butler University in Indianapolis, on April 27, 2007, where Vonnegut was being honored posthumously, his son Mark delivered a speech that the author wrote for the event, and which was reported as the last thing he wrote. It ends with this: "I thank you for your attention, and I'm outta here."^[61]
• Filmmaker Michael Moore included Vonnegut in the dedications for his 2007 film Sicko; at the end of the film, the words "Thank You Kurt Vonnegut for Everything" appear on the screen.
• The satirical newspaper The Onion contained a tribute to Vonnegut soon after he died, with a reference to his work Slaughterhouse-Five stating that he shouldn't be referred to as dead "without checking Dresden for his younger self first."^[62]
• On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, reintroduced Kurt's Mile High Malt to celebrate the late author's birthday.^[63] The beer was originally created by Vonnegut's grandfather, Albert Lieber, of the Indianapolis Brewery, using coffee as the secret ingredient. Kurt's Mile High Malt was first brewed in 1996 thanks to Wynkoop Founder and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a friend of Vonnegut's. At Vonnegut's request, coffee was added to the Mile High Malt, making it a close recreation of his grandfather's original.
• When Vonnegut died, members of the Alplaus Volunteer Fire Department in New York lowered the American flag to half staff, hung the funeral shroud, and rang a fire bell in accordance with the traditional 5-5-5 alarm used to honor fallen brothers. Vonnegut's name still appears on an old active fire-fighters roster, located next to a screen-print that he donated to the department.
• The Elam McKnight& Bob Bogdal album Zombie Nation includes a song entitled "Hocus Pocus" which is a homage to Kurt Vonnegut and is written from the first person perspective of the main character in the novel Hocus Pocus.
• Guitarist Joe Satriani wrote his song Ice 9 about the fictional substance from Cat's Cradle

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Farrell, Susan (August 2008), Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Facts on File, ISBN 0-8160-6598-5 

• Shields, Charles. (2011). And So It Goes:Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-8693-5.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Kurt Vonnegut

• Vonnegut.com Kurt Vonnegut's official website
• The Kurt Vonnegut Society
• Kurt Vonnegut papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington
• Kurt Vonnegut at the Internet Movie Database

Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman in Bruges in 2009
Background information
Born	(1964-03-30) March 30, 1964 (age 48)
Origin	Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Genres	Folk, blues-rock, pop, soul
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, musician
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, harp, bouzouki, banjo, clarinet, keyboards, organ, percussion, harmonica
Years active	1986–present
Labels	Elektra Records
Website	tracychapman.com

Tracy Chapman (born March 30, 1964) is an American singer-songwriter, best known for her singles "Fast Car", "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution", "Baby Can I Hold You", "Crossroads", "Give Me One Reason" and "Telling Stories". She is a multi-platinum and four-time Grammy Award-winning artist.^[1]

Biography[link]

Tracy Chapman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She was raised by her mother, who recognized Tracy's love of music and, despite not having much money, bought her a ukulele when she was just three.^[2] Chapman began playing guitar and writing songs at the age of eight. She says that she may have been first inspired to play the guitar by the television show Hee Haw.^[3]

Chapman was raised Baptist and went to an Episcopal high school.^[3] She was accepted into the program "A Better Chance", which helps minority students attend private schools. She graduated from Wooster School in Connecticut, then attended Tufts University.^[4] She graduated with a B.A. degree in anthropology and African studies.^[5]

In the mid-1990s, Chapman dated author Alice Walker.^[6] Chapman maintains a strong separation between her personal and professional lives. “I have a public life that’s my work life and I have my personal life,” she said. “In some ways, the decision to keep the two things separate relates to the work I do."^[7]

Chapman often performs at and attends charity events such as Make Poverty History, amfAR and AIDS/LifeCycle, to support social causes. She lives in San Francisco.

Career[link]

During college, Chapman began busking in Harvard Square and playing guitar in Club Passim and within other coffeehouses in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^{[citation needed]} Another Tufts student, Brian Koppelman, heard Chapman playing and brought her to the attention of his father, Charles Koppelman. Koppelman, who ran SBK Publishing, signed Chapman in 1986. After Chapman graduated from Tufts in 1987, he helped her to sign a contract with Elektra Records.^[5]

Chapman playing in Budapest, Hungary

At Elektra, she released Tracy Chapman (1988). The album was critically acclaimed, and she began touring and building a fanbase. Chapman's "Fast Car" began its rise on the US charts soon after she performed it at the televised Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert in June 1988; it became a number 6 pop hit on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending August 27, 1988. Rolling Stone ranked the song number 165 on their list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".^[8] It is the highest ranking song both written and performed by a female performer. "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution", the follow-up, charted at number 75 and was followed by "Baby Can I Hold You", which peaked at number 48. The album sold well, going multi-platinum and winning three Grammy Awards, including an honor for Chapman as Best New Artist. Later in 1988, Chapman was a featured performer on the worldwide Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour. According to the VH1 website, "Her album helped usher in the era of political correctness — along with 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M., Chapman's liberal politics proved enormously influential on American college campuses in the late '80s."^[9]

Her follow-up album Crossroads (1989) was less commercially successful, but still achieved platinum status. By 1992's Matters of the Heart, Chapman was playing to a small and devoted audience. Her fourth album New Beginning (1995) proved successful, selling over three million copies in the U.S. The album included the hit single "Give Me One Reason", which won the 1997 Grammy for Best Rock Song and became Chapman's most successful single to date, peaking at Number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Following a four-year hiatus, her fourth album, Telling Stories, was released in 2000. Its hit single, "Telling Stories", received heavy airplay on European radio stations and on Adult Alternative and Hot AC stations in the United States. Chapman toured Europe and the US in 2003 in support of her sixth album, Let It Rain (2002).

To support her seventh studio album, Where You Live (2005), Chapman toured major US cities in October and throughout Europe over the remainder of the year. The "Where You Live" tour was extended into 2006; the 28-date European tour featured summer concerts in Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the UK, Russia and more. On June 5, 2006, she performed at the 5th Gala of Jazz in Lincoln Center, New York, and in a session at the 2007 TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference in Monterey, California.

Chapman was commissioned by the American Conservatory Theater to compose music for its production of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot, a play on apartheid in South Africa, staged in early 2008.^[10]

Atlantic Records released Chapman's eighth studio album, Our Bright Future (2008).^[11] Chapman made a 26-date solo tour of Europe. She returned to tour Europe and selected North American cities during the summer of 2009. She was backed by Joe Gore on guitars, Patrick Warren on keyboards, and Dawn Richardson on percussion.^[12]

Social activism[link]

Chapman is widely regarded as a politically and socially active musician. In a 2009 interview with American radio network NPR, Chapman is quoted as saying: "I'm approached by lots of organizations and lots of people who want me to support their various charitable efforts in some way. And I look at those requests and I basically try to do what I can. And I have certain interests of my own, generally an interest in human rights."^[3] This interest in human rights can be seen lyrically in her music. Songs such as 1988's "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution" highlight the importance of speaking up against injustice. An example is this lyric from "Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution":

Don't you know, talking 'bout a revolution sounds like a whisper / when they're standing in the welfare lines.

Chapman's song "Fast Car" also brings awareness to the struggles of poverty, with lyrics such as:

I know things will get better / you'll find work and I'll get promoted / we'll move out of the shelter / buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs

Chapman's activism extends further than her lyrics. She has performed at numerous socially aware events, and continues to do so. In 1988, Tracy Chapman performed in London as part of a worldwide concert tour to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Amnesty International.^[13] The same year Chapman also performed in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, an event which raised money for South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Movement and seven children's charities.^[14] More recently, in 2004 Chapman performed (and rode) in the AIDSLifeCycle event.^[15]

Chapman has also been involved with Cleveland’s elementary schools. A music video produced by Chapman that highlights significant achievements in African-American history has become an important teaching tool in Cleveland Public Schools. Chapman also agreed to sponsor a "Crossroads in Black History" essay contest for high school students in Cleveland and other cities.^[16]

In 2004, Chapman was given an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts by her alma mater, Tufts University, recognizing her commitment to Social Activism.^[17]

I'm fortunate that I've been able to do my work and be involved in certain organizations, certain endeavors, and offered some assistance in some way. Whether that is about raising money or helping to raise awareness, just being another body to show some force and conviction for a particular idea. Finding out where the need is - and if someone thinks you're going to be helpful, then helping.

—Tracy Chapman^[18]

Discography[link]

• 1988: Tracy Chapman
• 1989: Crossroads
• 1992: Matters of the Heart
• 1995: New Beginning
• 2000: Telling Stories
• 2002: Let It Rain
• 2005: Where You Live
• 2008: Our Bright Future

Contributions[link]

Duet songs:

• "The Thrill Is Gone" with BB King from his album Deuces Wild
• "Give Me One Reason" with Eric Clapton from the album A Very Special Christmas Live
• "Baby Can I Hold You" with Pavarotti from the DVD/Album Pavarotti and Friends for Cambodia and Tibet
• "Ain't No Sunshine" with Buddy Guy from his album Bring 'Em In
• "Trench Town Rock" with Stephen and Ziggy Marley at the One Love Bob Marley All Star Tribute
• "The Maker" with Dave Matthews on October 21, 2001 at the Bridge School Benefit