Kurt Vonnegut College Commencement Address: Speech to Students (1999)

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 -- April 11, 2007) was an American writer. 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 pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith (née Lieber). 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. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and went to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. On Mother's Day 1944, while on leave during World War II, he discovered that his mother had committed suicide with sleeping pills. 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; that same year, Vonnegut began living with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz,[2] although he did not divorce Cox until 1979. 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; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, wrote two books: one was about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the other includes anecdotes of growing up when his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, as well as what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut