Kilgore Trout as Kurt Vonneguts Alter Ego :: Biography Biographies Essays

Kilgore Trout as Kurt Vonnegut's Alter Ego In 1922, two residents of Indianapolis, Indiana had a son who would later become one of the premiere writers in 20th century American literature. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born to Edith and Kurt Sr. on November 11, 1922. He graduated from Shortridge High School in 1940, attended Cornell University for a year, then joined the army. He fought in World War II and was captured by the Germans in 1944. As a Prisoner of War, he lived through the firebombing of Dresden, an event which inspired his acclaimed novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. After he returned from Europe in April of 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox and spent several years studying at the University of Chicago and working as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1947, he went to work at General Electric Corporation as a research laboratory publicist. He worked there for 3 years until he left to become a full time writer in 1950. In the past 47 years, he has become one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Kurt Vonnegut's first novel was entitled Player Piano and was published in 1952. Since then, he has written over a dozen other novels, collections of short stories, a collection of essays and interviews, and a play, Happy Birthday Wanda June. He spent 1965 in residence at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and taught writing at Harvard in 1970. He also was awarded a M.A. degree from the University of Chicago. Vonnegut currently appears on the Barnes and Noble Booksellers bag and is featured on a Visa commercial in which he buys a copy of one of his own books. If one looks through Vonnegut's works, one will find many occurrences of reoccurring characters, settings, and themes. Perhaps one of the most frequently occurring characters is Kilgore Trout, an obscure science-fiction writer with a small but