Kurt Vonnegut, Indianapolis Made

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November eleventh, nineteen twenty-two, in Indianapolis, into a family that had been building the city for three generations. His grandfather Bernard Vonnegut had cofounded an architectural firm in eighteen eighty-eight. His father Kurt Vonnegut Senior was an architect who designed buildings in the city. His mother was the daughter of the family that owned the Indianapolis Brewing Company. The Vonneguts were established, comfortable, German-American, and deeply rooted.

The Depression demolished the family's finances, and with them a good deal of the certainty that had shaped Vonnegut's early childhood. His father's architectural practice shrank to almost nothing. His mother suffered and eventually took her own life in nineteen forty-four, the night before Mother's Day. Vonnegut was in the Army by then. He was captured by German forces in the Battle of the Bulge and survived the firebombing of Dresden in February of nineteen forty-five in an underground meat locker beneath a slaughterhouse. The experience eventually became Slaughterhouse-Five.

He left Indianapolis but never stopped being from there. Returning to the city in nineteen eighty-six for a public event, he told the audience: "All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business."

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library opened on Indiana Avenue, one of Alexander Ralston's original diagonal streets. It holds his typewriter, his correspondence, original manuscripts, drawings. One of his most quoted lines comes from his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, spoken by a character to newborn twins: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies. God damn it, you've got to be kind."