Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
by Dan Wakefield
Added:
Aug 13, 2026
Book Description
This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide.
Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud.
Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels - from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon.
Notes & Highlights
November 20, 1971
You’re learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable social structure-that the older people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons—and what have you got? A space wanderer named Nan.
And that’s O.K. I’m a space wanderer named Kurt, and Jane’s a space wanderer named Jane, and so on. When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.
You are dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well—I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse-Five was published, but that’s malarky. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.
September 14, 1979
The luckiest thing I ever did was to teach at lowa for those two years. I picked up a very classy extended family that way. It made you and John and John and John and some others quality relatives of mine for life. I used to be in this trade all alone. Suddenly, I was a member of a really great gang. I never tire of asking you and the rest, “How goes it?” If you are ever in trouble, I will take you in.
March 5, 1987
I just finished reading a Ph.D. thesis by a guy your age named William Keough. It’s about violence in American humor, and he examines Twain, Bierce, Lardner, and myself. The others wound up in despair over human nature, he says, and implies that I can scarcely do otherwise. One possible escape route is open to me, however, which was not evident to the other three. That is the extraordinarily important idea (I only now understand) which I picked up from Anthropology: culture is a gadget which can be tinkered with like a Model-T Ford. Our President supposes that his brain is producing his opinions. His brain in fact is soaked in a culture, and has never bothered to examine its ingredients. He oozes rather than thinks.
October 11, 1995
People capable of loving some paintings or etchings or whatever can rarely do this without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is one half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for sincerity? There are virtually no beloved or respected paintings made by persons of whom we know nothing. We can even surmise a lot about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caves underneath Lascaux, France. … Pictures are famous for their human-ness and not their picture-ness.
June 18, 1996
Politics? I will vote Democratic because that is the most humane of the two parties, but not by much. The Clintons are shal- low, opportunist Yuppies, but they are the only game in town. Doesn’t Dole make you ashamed to be a World War Two vet? What a crabby old poop!
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