Few authors are precisely what devoted fans imagine them to be from reading their books, but rarely has the disconnect been more pronounced than it was with Kurt Vonnegut. His novels proclaim an easy-to-digest morality that pits simple human kindness against cosmic malevolence, flinging humorous defiance at an unjust world. Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, captured the countercultural zeitgeist of the 1960s and have beguiled generations of young adults drawn to the writer's self-described mission: "catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents … poison their minds with humanity."
Humanity is not a word that springs readily to mind in association with Vonnegut after finishing Charles J. Shields's empathetic but unsparing biography. Cruel, nasty, and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes. Vonnegut could be charming, but he was seldom kind; he frequently repaid loyalty with abandonment and betrayal. When Shields met the author in December 2006, he found "a lonely, disenchanted man" still angrily picking at childhood wounds.
Born in 1922, Vonnegut saw his wealthy family's fortunes disintegrate following the 1929 stock market crash. He bitterly recalled his mother savagely branding her husband a failure, and he resented the preference he believed his parents displayed for older brother Bernard, a scientific prodigy. Vonnegut blamed Bernard for pressuring him to attend Cornell instead of taking the job he'd been offered at the Indianapolis Star newspaper. He did poorly in college and dropped out to enlist in the Army in 1943.
"And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life," by Charles J. Shields. 528 pages. Henry Holt. $30.
Shortly before he embarked for Europe, his mother committed suicide—while Vonnegut was home on leave, on Mother's Day. As a POW in Germany, he retrieved the remains of residents smothered in their basements by the firestorm that engulfed Dresden after the Allied bombing. He saw starving fellow prisoners shot for stealing food. Thirteen years later, he watched his beloved sister die of breast cancer—the day after her husband drowned in a freakish train crash. Vonnegut may have nursed standard-issue youthful grievances far too long, but he also experienced real horrors that justified his fiction's existential wariness.......
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/29/kurt-vonnegut-biography-reveals-an-unhappy-and-nasty-writer.html
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