Kurt Vonnegut Biography Essay

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr.(died 1956), was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, Kurt sr. would have long periods of unemployment, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from mental illness. She committed suicide in 1944 by an overdose of sleeping pills, which haunted Vonnegut for the rest of his life.He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him that, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Vonnegut went to Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and was sent into combat shortly after his arrival to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. With much

They moved to a house in Chicago in 1945 and there they had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and had a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he wrote fiction for magazines. Because being a writer is not a high paying job, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto