Jerome Klinkowitz

A defining analysis of the entire span of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction

6 x 9, 228 pages
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-520-2, $39.95s

ABOUT THE BOOK

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few American writers since Mark Twain to have won and sustained a great popular acceptance while boldly introducing new themes and forms on the literary cutting edge. This is the "Vonnegut effect" that Jerome Klinkowitz finds unique among postmodernist authors.

In this definitive study of the author's fiction, Klinkowitz examines the forces in American life that have made Vonnegut's works possible—some would say necessary. Born in 1922 and still writing trenchantly more than eighty years later, Vonnegut shares with readers a world that includes the Great Depression, during which his family lost their economic support; the Second World War, in which he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and experienced the firebombing of Dresden; the corporate surge of postwar America, which he abetted as a publicist for General Electric's Research Laboratory, where "Progress Is Our Most Important Product"; the entrepreneurship of the 1950s, which he participated in when he ran a Saab automobile dealership and operated a short-story business selling to the era's family magazines; and the countercultural revolt of the 1960s, during which his fiction first gained prominence. Vonnegut also takes us through the growth in recent decades of America's sway in art, which his fiction celebrates, and geopolitics, which his novels question.

A pioneer in Vonnegut studies publishing in the field since 1969, Jerome Klinkowitz offers The Vonnegut Effect as a thorough treatment of the author's fiction—a canon covering more than a half century and comprising twenty books. Considering both Vonnegut's methods and the cultural needs they have served, Klinkowitz explains how those works came to be written and concludes with an assessment of the author's place in the tradition of American fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerome Klinkowitz is the author of forty books, including novels, collections of short stories, and studies of literature, philosophy, art, music, air combat narratives, and sports. Klinkowitz's Vonnegut in Fact, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1998, complements The Vonnegut Effect by analyzing the author's extensive nonfiction works. A former working musician and owner/operator of a minor league baseball team, Klinkowitz is a professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Reviews

"The Vonnegut Effect—an exciting new study of one of America's most important, innovative, and popular novelists by one of our most important, innovative, and popular literary critics—is an excellent complement to Jerome Klinkowitz's earlier landmark works. Klinkowitz illustrates the prescience of Kurt Vonnegut's literary vision by demonstrating how Vonnegut's themes and techniques anticipate sociohistorical trends. Lively, provocative, and compelling, The Vonnegut Effect is as interesting and accessible to general readers as it is indispensable to students and scholars of modern American literature and culture."—Barbara Tepa Lupack, author of Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction

"Throughout his trailblazing work on contemporary American fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz has turned to Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly. This new monograph offers the most comprehensive, literary–historically grounded, and reader–friendly account to date of Vonnegut's fiction, with an eye to its evolving strategies of reader appeal."—Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning

"In The Vonnegut Effect, Jerome Klinkowitz masterfully illuminates the intersection of a great artist's life and work and, in doing so, creates an engaging and essential study that belongs on the shelf right next to the volumes by the Grand Old Man himself."—Robert B. Weide, writer/producer of Mother Night and Kurt Vonnegut: American Made

BOOK FLYER

Download the flyer/order form here. You will need Adobe Reader which is free from Adobe.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction