NPR reports that Kurt Vonnegut (84) died last night. His Wikipedia entry has already been updated to reflect the date of his death. According to an NPR quote, for decades Vonnegut had been engaged in the "fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide" of smoking, but in the end was done in by complications from a fall- which just goes to show what must happen one day even to the mightiest.
I'll be talking more this week about Kurt Vonnegut. When one of my favorite authors dies, I usually enjoy some of their writing in their honor. For now I'll end with one thought:
Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922. Let me repeat that. 1922. He grew up through the Great Depression and WW I. He was a private in WW II (and was captured as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany). The quote "So it goes" from his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five became an anti-war slogan for protesting Vietnam, and he was an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. My point here isn't simply about Vonnegut's politics- it's about the span of his life, the times he lived through, and his extraordinary personal engagement with the most important events of modern history. Here's a guy who had a story to tell, and boy did he ever.
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