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Apr 4, 2023 · In his late career book God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.” Throughout his career, Vonnegut often wrote of his humanist views, tracing them back to his “freethinking” ancestors in Indiana.
Jun 14, 2022 · Fortunately, help has arrived in the form of Behaving Decently: Kurt Vonnegut’s Humanism by Wayne Laufert, a book just published by Humanist Press. It analyzes the man’s literary output with special emphasis on his intellectual ideas.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Not really a surprise to find this at #1, right? If you have not read this book, what can I say? You should. You may hate it, or you may want to get portions of it tattooed on your body.
- Cat's Cradle (1963) I have never dog-eared a book to mark pages or quotations I'd like to remember as frequently as I did Cat's Cradle. This book features one of Vonnegut's coolest and most popularly enduring sci-fi concepts (ice-9), as well as his made-up religion Bokononism, which seems to exist mainly in the form of pleasant, pithy witticisms and observations.
- Mother Night (1961) I would argue that this is the novel when Kurt Vonnegut became Kurt Vonnegut. If you read Sirens of Titan and then Cat's Cradle, you may be forgiven for not immediately thinking they were written by the same author.
- Timequake (1997) Vonnegut was well known for his essays and public addresses, many of which were included in collections like Palm Sundayand Fates Worse Than Death(only crucifixion, it would seem) and which are wonderful, funny, and endlessly entertaining.
May 12, 2014 · Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) — a man of discipline, a champion of literary style, modern sage, poetic shaman of happiness, and one wise dad — endures as one of the most prolific and sought-after commencement speakers of all time.
For the first time, Vonnegut is revealed as the complete human being he was that prioritized humanity and revealed reality through his often darkly humorous fiction. Laufert's composition of Vonnegut's work presents key humanistic goalposts for today's aspiring humanists while simultaneously suggesting that we temper our rigidity so that we can ...
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Oct 12, 2019 · The epigraph to the book is a quote from Iowa: “Write like a human being. Write like a writer,” Vonnegut said. With rare photographs and reproductions as well as a generous offering of the novelist’s aphorisms, short essays, articles, speeches, and interviews, Pity the Reader elucidates this imperative, offering insight into both craft ...
