Jerome Klinkowitz

Investigates Kurt Vonnegut's extensive nonfiction as a key to understanding his radically innovative novels

6 x 9, 159 pages
cloth, ISBN 1-57003-237-8, $29.95s

ABOUT THE BOOK

Vonnegut in Fact offers a thorough assessment of the artistry of Kurt Vonnegut, known not only as the best-selling author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, and a dozen other novels, but also as the most widely recognized public spokesperson among writers since Mark Twain. In this volume, Jerome Klinkowitz traces the emergence of Vonnegut's nonfiction since the 1960s, when commentary and feature journalism replaced his rapidly dying short-story market.

Offering close readings and insightful criticism of Vonnegut's three major works of nonfiction, his many uncollected pieces, and his unique manner of public speaking, Klinkowitz explains how Vonnegut's personal visions developed into a style of great public responsibility that mirrored the growth of his fiction. The investigation of the writer's extensive nonfiction provides a key to understanding his distinctively inventive novels and the manner in which his public spokesmanship influenced his artistic expression.

Throughout, Vonnegut is seen as a gentle manipulator of popular forms and an extremely personable figure; what might seem radically innovative and even iconoclastic in his fiction becomes comfortably avuncular and familiarly American when followed to its roots in his public spokesmanship.

As Vonnegut himself told Klinkowitz, "It really makes a difference, I find, if people hear me speak." As for the nature of his own work, fictive and nonfictive alike, Vonnegut has judged: "I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerome Klinkowitz is the author of more than thirty books, including novels, collections of short stories, studies of literature, philosophy, art, music, sports, and air combat narratives. A former working musician and owner and operator of a minor league baseball team, he is a professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa.

EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Sometimes criticized as an apparent nihilist, Kurt Vonnegut in fact brings a message that is hopeful. If life seems without purpose, perhaps it is because we have tried (and failed) to impose a purpose inappropriately. The quest for meaning can be self-defeating, especially when pursued with the rigidities of conventions that in truth no longer apply. The radicalness of the author's own propositions seem so only because of the persistence of those conventions he so successfully interrogates.

REVIEWS

"Jerome Klinkowitz' methodology is refreshing in that it avoids both the mind trap of genre classification and psycho-biographical babble in trying to reconstruct Vonnegut's life experience as he turns to a simpler, but perhaps until now obscured, explanation for Vonnegut's development."—Midwest Book Review

"So viewed, the prefaces and the novels they set out to 'sell' once again set off the remarkable scope of Vonnegut's rhetorical project, a project that Jerome Klinkowitz's new book reconstructs most persuasively."—American Book Review