Kurt Vonnegut and the Book That Took Twenty-Three Years

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on November eleventh, nineteen twenty-two, the son of a German-American architect. He was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Bulge in nineteen forty-four and taken to Dresden, a city of baroque architecture and minimal military significance. On the night of February thirteenth, nineteen forty-five, the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces firebombed Dresden. Vonnegut survived in a meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse the Germans called Schlachthof Funf. Slaughterhouse Five.

He spent twenty-three years trying to write a book about it.

For most of those years he told people that he was working on a great anti-war novel and could not make it come out right. He could not find the distance. He could not find the frame. He produced fragments, outlines, false starts. He told the story later in the introduction to what finally appeared: that he had imagined the book as a simple, angry account of what had happened, and discovered that no simple account was possible.

Slaughterhouse-Five was published in nineteen sixty-nine. It was partly a novel about the destruction of Dresden. It was partly a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel about the destruction of Dresden. Its signature phrase, used to mark every death in the book, was a sentence of three words: So it goes. Vonnegut said it was the only honest thing he had found to say about what he had seen.

The novel was immediately one of the most significant American books of the twentieth century. Vonnegut spent the rest of his life explaining that he was from Indianapolis and had not meant for any of this to happen.