Connor- Slaughter House 5 Author

Born
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.November 11, 1922(1922-11-11)Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Died
April 11, 2007 (aged 84)New York, New York, United States
Occupation
Novelist, Essayist
Nationality
American
Writing period
1950-2005
Genres
Literary fictionSatireBlack comedyScience fiction

Early years
Kurt Vonnegut was born to fourth-generation German-American parents (Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith née Lieber), son and grandson in the Indianapolis firm Vonnegut & Bohn. He attended Cornell University, where he served as assistant managing editor and associate editor for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, and majored in Chemistry. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. The army sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering. On May 14, 1944, Mothers' Day, his mother committed suicide.

World War II
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was cut off from his battalion along with five other battalion scouts who wandered behind enemy lines for several days until being captured by Wehrmacht troops on December 14, 1944. Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After insulting some German soldiers that were guarding him he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away. While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, also known as the "Florence of the Elbe," in February 1945. Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meatlocker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five), which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut eventually remarked, "there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes. Vonnegut was repatriated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".

Post-war career
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. The University of Chicago later accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content and awarded him the M.A. degree in 1971.
On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th Century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine and the Modern Library.
Early in his adult life he moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod, where he managed the first SAAB dealership established in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut