Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

Perhaps I am wearing rose colored glasses when I read this, with KV being my favorite author, but this book will show you how the man thought throughout the decades in a way that no biographer can ever capture. His letters flourish with wit, humor, insecurity, grandiose notions, and indignation. He outlines his struggles to become a literary giant, while not understanding how he achieved this title.You actually can picture him at the typewriter and share in the "mood of the moment" of his thoughts, written to a wide variety of people through the 60 years that this testaments span.As a true fan of his literature, you won't be sorry for this purchase as you revisit books long past, and my guess is that after reading this you will be dusting off Breakfast of Champions and Cat's Cradle to fully understand what you have just enjoyed reading.Finally you will receive a sense of American history and where the world was, is and is perhaps heading towards. Just loved it and snorted this book up like a cocaine addict.5 stars.

It's rare that a book's introduction makes me speak out loud while reading. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't reading aloud. I just found myself saying "Wow" and "Huh!" and "I didn't know that!" out loud, to myself, as I read this beautiful book. As an artist, I found the cover photo and art and even the fonts of the chapter headings both stunning and a fond visit back to the Seventies. But as a reader, and a passionate re-reader of writers I love, I was intrigued and fascinated by the introduction- written with passionate restraint by Dan Wakefield.Honestly? I rarely read more than one page of book introductions, as they usually reveal more about the writer of the Introduction than the person the Introducer is introducing. But this is happily not the case with Dan Wakefield. I love Wakefield's books, especially "Expect A Miracle" and "Spiritually Incorrect." Actually, now that I think about it, I probably only began to read this Introduction because it was written by Dan Wakefield! His clear, concise and empathetic prose informed me deeply about Kurt Vonnegut and his influences, his family and his artistic struggles to have his iconic and iconoclastic voice published and read.In fact, a unique and welcome addition to this book is the introduction of each era of letters- which smartly and helpfully places us in the context of Vonnegut's life when he wrote the letters and to whom he was writing. It's such a simple technique but begs the question of why this isn't done more with published letters of notable people... and in this book the chapter introductions serve to create more comprehension of Vonnegut's life and how he dealt with family, friends, associates, success and disappointment. Not only did I feel I was learning so much more about Vonnegut, in almost a biographical way, but this book served to make me want to hunt down a biography of Vonnegut-- but only if it's as well written as this one.The mark of a good book is one that inspires me to read more. Kurt Vonnegut's Letters not only makes me want to read more Vonnegut but it also makes me want to go back and re-read my treasured Dan Wakefield books.Great winter read. Stay inside, get cozy on a couch under a blanket and disappear into the mind of a great man as commemorated by another great man.

This is the real Kurt Vonnegut - from 'the horse's mouth' as it were, or as he would have added - "Well one end of the animal or the other anyway!" Then he'd of exploded into his trademark sheet-tearing Pall Malls inflicted wet laugh, the brand he smoked furiously all his life and that a classmate eponymously named 'Vonneguts' at Iowa.On the fly leaf of the book, KV replies to a relative who wrote telling him he thought KV was one of 'America's literary giants'."I am an American fad on an order only slightly higher than the hula hoop," he wrote back. This was in the '80's probably, when the critics were not being very kind to his work.It's true that KV was at just the right place and at just the right time in the anti-war cultural context of the '60's/early '70's and that helped account for the runaway best seller success of 'Slaughterhouse Five'.Like a fine song on the the 'oldies' station in the car, many of the boomer generation can listen to his voice without tiring, like listening to an old friend who has chatting with us from the grave.This no matter no matter what the pecksniffery of English major lit crit twits said about his work in the '80's, trying to dismiss him as '...a 'graphic novelist' who's written a series of what amounts to Marvel Comics'.Well, how about we tell the twits that there are a lot of us 'English majors' out there that happen to like Marvel Comics and Vonnegut and Terry Southern and Bill Fox and Charles Portis too.Anyway, I'm reminded of the Paul Simon lyric: "It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts; Medicine is magical and magical is art."KV was a magical artist and still is. He will always be one of my generations 'up the pop charts' heroes and more, not just because he was our friend and mentor at Iowa, but because starting with after 'Breakfast' he began first person personal conversations with us so every one felt like they knew and liked him.He was very human and a vulnerable man too, as we see from these letters, like all writers. In these letters we see that after the sudden success of 'Five' he is struck down by '...the black and shattered' years' that followed, including a suicide attempt.Stabilized some in the '80's, KV writes that he didn't like the 'Requiem Mass' he'd heard sung at a friend's funeral because when it was translated Latin into English he thought the monks had - 'not only got it all wrong - but they'd done it badly too'. So he wrote his own Requiem Mass in English (then had it translated into Latin) and it was performed by a large choral at a Unitarian Church in Albany, New York.BTW the Unitarian Church was the only church he ever considered joining he wrote - '...because they don't believe in much of anything.' Pure Vonnegut.So think of the letters in this book as the lyrics of an autobiographical Requiem Mass, written in English by the 'horse's mouth' as he'd say, more or less.And BTW, I only gave 'Kurt Vonnegut Letters' five stars ... because Amazon has not seen fit to offer a sixth! dc

Excellent volume of Vonnegut's letters; if you're a Vonnegut fan it's essential reading, if you're new to the Master, this is still a fine read, brimming with the great man's warmth and humanity.

As a long time fan of Vonnegut's writing, this volume was everything I hoped it would be. Read this book

And here is the man himself - so wise, so angry, so funny. A glimpse into an extraordinary twentieth century life.

excellent insight in to this great writers life i love this guy, a great example of an honest and humorous human being

Creo que he leído todo menos un par de libros de antología de artículos. Así que mi opinión es la de un admirador que conoce la obra de Vonnegut. Ahora puedo decir que conozco un poco más a la persona. Y no me ha defraudado. La compilación de cartas abarca toda la vida del autor, por orden cronológico y, con la ayuda de las notas y los comentarios para darnos un poco de contexto, nos da una visión de un ser humano sorprendentemente coherente.No creo que sea un libro para el lector casual.