If you haven't read one of his books, you're missing out on one of the utterly unique voices in American literature. His influences are everywhere from David Foster Wallace to Haruki Murakami, but Vonnegut's style remains his own, impossible to imitate. Start with Slaughterhouse-Five, although any of his essay collections are excellent and offer the most unfiltered voice of his work.
I could go on and on about why Vonnegut mattered so much, but why do that when the man's considerable body of work speaks so loud? He was Mark Twain for the nuclear age. There'll be hundreds of tributes to the man in coming days, people spinning out quotes and theories and praise, but none of them will have quite as much to say as any one of Vonnegut's tall tales of life and death and lunacy. Who will take his place now?
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1 - El Bicho
Vonnegut's Blues For America 07 January, 2006 Sunday Herald
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
2 - Enlightened Planet
A few years back I wrote down a few quotes from Mr. Vonnegut's "Timequake". Here are a couple which seem appropriate at this time:
“This very summer, I asked the novelist William Styron in a Chinese restaurant how many people on the whole planet had what we had, which was lives worth living. Between the two of us, we came up with seventeen percent.”
“I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!”
3 - scissorcircus
Kurt's words lead me in the direction of happiness...
"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
4 - troll
actually I'm relieved somewhat by the great one's passing as I have harbored a suspicion that he really had some ice-9 saved for his final moment
I guess not
5 - David
A site called Uclue has an interesting research article on Kurt Vonnegut's days as a cub reporter in Chicago, and his morally dubious techniques for covering a story of an especially grisly death: Kurt Vonnegut
Uclue.com was founded by resarchers from Google Answers and they do wonderful work on some amazingly obscure questions.
I thought folks here would like to know about it.
6 - Roger Browne
Thanks for the mention, David. I'm one of the Uclue researchers.
Literary types may also be interested in a question we tackled last year - the translation of a previously unseen handwritten note by Victor Hugo, author of Hunchback of Notre Dame.