The Sirens of Titan (1959)
At a low point in his career, pressed by need and uncertainty, Vonnegut encountered his old Cornell classmate Knox Burger, now an editor at Dell, at a New York cocktail party. Burger asked whether Vonnegut had any ideas for a marketable novel....
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
On January 12, 1944, German soldiers transported 150 American prisoners of war, including Private Kurt Vonnegut, from Stalag IV-B in Mühlberg to Dresden, thirty miles to the south.. In Dresden, Vonnegut would witness first-hand the most destructive aerial bombing of the war....
Cat's Cradle (1963)
In the early 1930s, H.G. Wells visited General Electric's research laboratories in Schenectady, a facility dubbed the House of Magic by GE’s public relations department. Here the famous author was hosted by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, who suggested an idea for a story to Wells....
Five years ago this week, Kurt Vonnegut died at the age of 84. To mark the occasion, I am publishing essays on three of Vonnegut's best-known science fiction works: The Sirens of Titan , Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five .