Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was simultaneously bleak and hilarious, just like his novels, in this 1990 interview. His books include ‘Slaughterhouse-5’, ‘Cat’s Cradle’, and ‘Welcome to the Monkey House’. He was on a book tour for his 13th novel ‘Hocus Pocus’ at the time of this interview. His books have been described as science fiction, satire, and post-modern but he rejected all such labels. In 2007 Lev Grossman wrote “Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike—he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.”