Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer

The first and only YA biography of the great American novelist and humanist and author of such classics as Slaughterhouse Five. Now in Paperback.

＂Mr. Wakefield’s account of Vonnegut’s life is funny and tender, the kind of book that will leave you bruised and happy and reverberating a little, as if you are a piano that someone has just finished playing.＂ --Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, and many other brilliant novels and short stories, is one of our greatest American writers, often using science fiction, humor, and a humanist view of society, religion, politics, and human nature in his writing to show us the absurdity and the loveliness of life on earth. Born in 1922, Vonnegut’s life was full of great fortune and great despair: his family was wealthy, but lost everyting in the market crash of 1929; he was the youngest son in a loving family, until his mother fell into a depression and committed suicide; he joined the army in WWII with great pride for our country, but experienced instead a world of destruction and horror. These and many others were the experiences that made him a writer. But how did he channel the highs and lows of his life into great writing?

Dan Wakefield, a friend and mentee of Vonnegut’s for decades and a fellow Hoosier, distills the facts including Kurt’s novels, essays, interviews, letters and personal experiences, into a beautiful telling of the making of a writer. Using the second person ＂You,＂ it is as though Wakefield is a friend walking through Kurt’s life alongside him, a guide for readers to his extraordinary life. The book also includes original art by Vonnegut and family photographs. Here is an American life, a burgeoning artist’s life to inspire anyone who has read Vonnegut’s work or who themselves aspire to write.

Dan Wakefield is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, he was an Eagle Scout and began his writing career as a columnist of his high school newspaper, The Shortridge Daily Echo. Shortridge High was also the school Kurt Vonnegut had graduated from a few years earlier. They didn’t know each other at the time, but eventually they met and became lifelong friends.
Dan has served as a sports correspondent and writer for a number of magazines and newspapers including Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine. His best-selling novels Going All The Way and Starting Over were made into feature films, and a documentary film was produced of his memoir New York in the Fifties. He splits his time between Indianapolis IN and Miami FL.