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Preface
- University of South Carolina Press
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PREFACE Kurt Vonnegut’s America derives from what I was doing in the days following Kurt’s death. Knowing that he’d suffered irrecoverable brain injuries in a fall three weeks previous and, after all measures to help him failed, that he’d been taken off life support a few days before, I received the news with a sense of grim inevitability. I’d been mourning for almost a month and knew his loss would be difficult to bear. But then, within hours of the public announcement, everything came alive. Away from home—I was up in Madison, Wisconsin, doing research on Frank Lloyd Wright—I was hard to reach, but phone messages poured in. National Public Radio, a number of state public-radio networks, CBS News Radio in Los Angeles, the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, even the BBC: everyone wanted something on Kurt Vonnegut. And so I complied, giving what was asked, from thirty-second comments to hour-long discussions. All Things Considered, To the Point, Nightwaves, and many more—the whole roster, it seemed, of public broadcasting that usually figured in my life as background to the day’s events. For now, Kurt Vonnegut was the event, and it brought his work to life for me in a way four decades of literary criticism hadn’t. The book at hand was begun right after the last of these radio shows and is written in the style I found comfortable for discussing Kurt’s impact on his country. It is personal and critically informal yet rooted in the common dialogue Americans share, especially when considering national matters that touch their own lives. Millions of lives were indeed touched by Vonnegut’s works, and it’s in the voice I found so natural for All Things Considered and the other discussions in which I took part that this book is written. Kurt had been expecting death, hoping for its release for some time, outspokenly since having lived longer than did his father. And so my book begins with a treatment of this sense of release, perhaps the last conscious thoughts he had as he toppled off his front steps there on East 48th Street before his head hit the pavement. It ends with a sense of Vonnegut uncaged, the drawing he left as his epitaph. Preface x I’m not a computer person, but friends tell me that empty birdcage, door open, appeared in the Kurt Vonnegut Web site the day after he died. Maybe it’s still up there now. Print-oriented folks can see it stamped on the hardcover edition of Timequake, the book that Kurt had declared would be his last novel, and that was. I’m glad he’s free. But his influence is still with us, and that’s what Kurt Vonnegut’s America is about. My thanks go to all those public-radio outlets that got me going on this project, to André Eckenrode for his helpfulness in tracking internet sources, to the readers who refereed this book for the University of South Carolina Press, and to the University of Northern Iowa, which has always been and probably always will be my sole source of support. ...