I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good. –Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show - an Interview with Jon Stewart
Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show - an Interview with Jon Stewart
May Peace be with you, Kurt Vonnegut by Harvey Wasserman
The mainstream obituaries are emphasizing Kurt's "off-beat" career and the "mixed reviews" for his books. Don't believe a word of them.
Kurt Vonnegut was a force of nature, with a heart the size of Titan, an unfettered genius who changed us all for the better. He was possessed of a sense of fairness and morality capable of inventing religions that could actually work.
Now he's having dinner with our beloved siren of social justice, Molly Ivins, sharing a Manhattan, scorching this goddam war and this latest batch of fucking idiots.
It hurts to think about it. But we should be grateful for what we got, and all they gave us. So it goes.
Remembering Kurt Vonnegut Jr. by Stephen Milligan
It’s a funny thing to read about the death of an author you enjoyed. You never knew him, talked to him or even saw him, yet the loss is somehow a personal one. You remember the only conversations you did share with the man — those wonderful books he wrote, seemingly just for you — and you realize that there will be no more of those books. The ink well is dry, the pen put away forever...Why does Vonnegut endure so well? by Carlin Romano
...he was just as important as Updike or Roth or Bellow or any number of the other post-war novelists who attacked the American Dream with such vitriol. His themes were more about humanity than America, about the contrasting desires to be kind, which can bring us our greatest moments, and to fight, which causes the colossal blunders we call wars.
Like his hero Mark Twain, Vonnegut united three American bents that often split off from one another in European culture and literature - antiauthoritarianism, a playful attitude toward it, and open-hearted solidarity toward all innocent others, regardless of class...
...in a comment to Rolling Stone that might have astonished the Vonnegut of the '70s, his alter ego of the 21st century quipped, "Honestly, I wish Nixon were president. Bush is so ignorant."
