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Chapter One At the beginning of 1969 Kurt Vonnegut was forty-six years old and the author of five novels, two short-story collections, forty-six separately published short stories (in magazines as familiar as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post), and twenty feature essays and reviews. However, he was almost totally unknown -unknown in public terms, that is. With his more than half a million words in print, editors knew him-but as a professional pigeonholed as doing science fiction or selling to the slicks rather than as a major voice in American culture. True, much of his production was undertaken, by necessity, in commercial fashion. Rejected stories with a technical theme were shuttled off to the nickel-a-word venues of Argosy and Worlds of If; when the family magazine markets dried up, he found he could make the same money by outlining paperback originals, which is how some of his most important novels were conceived; and to support himself and his large family by his writing he undertook review assignments on far from literary topics. But compared to other major writers at similar stages in their careers, Kurt Vonnegut at midpoint was laboring in virtual obscurity, writing fiction and fact alike that were not having any public impact beyond a moment's entertainment and another month's expenses met. Beginning in March of 1969, all that changed. With the publication of his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut found himself in unlikely places: as the lead item in the most prominent national book reviews and as a major presence on the best-seller lists of these same newspapers and journals. Quality alone is rarely the distinguishing factor in such attention. In Vonnegut's case, subsequent scholarship has shown that Cat's Cradle and Mother Night are as significant achievements as Slaughterhouse-Five, yet the former never outsold its first printing of six thousand copies and received just a few passing reviews, while the latter's debut as a paperback original meant no media coverage at all, a fate shared with The Sirens of Titan, another work now considered central to the Vonnegut canon. Rather, as any publicist will testify, getting reviewed by major critics on the front pages of book sections is a privilege mostly reserved for the country's best-known authors. Getting there as an unknown is a rare achievement indeed, the reasons for which merit close study. Emerging from Anonymity A correlation exists between the first two major reviews of SlaughterhouseFive : each was written by a critic who had heard Vonnegut speak to audiences, and who had been, moreover, deeply impressed by the personal voice in the author's fictive statement. Not that public speaking was Kurt Vonnegut's chosen profession; rather, his talk at Notre Dame University's Literary Festival (as heard by Granville Hicks) and his two-year lectureship at the University of Iowa (where Robert Scholes was a colleague) were stopgap measures to generate some income after his customary publishing markets had either closed (as in the case of Collier 's and the Post) or ceased to respond. Those who have met him know he is a quiet person much protective of his privacy; for him, public speaking is a nervous chore. More than once he has observed of a lecture that instead of courting laughs and easy applause he should be at home doing his real work, writing novels. But with the relative failure of his fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to make much headway in 1965, novel writing was no longer an option, and so Vonnegut accepted a teaching position at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and booked speeches at literary festivals and library dedications around the country as ways of matching the modest income his short stories and paperback originals had generated before. This was what was known to Granville Hicks in 1969, when the venerable old critic (who had made his initial mark as a commentator on socially radical literature of the Great Depression era) was faced with introducing an unknown author to his readers in the Saturday Review.' The new novel itself, SlaughterhouseFive , was an equally difficult topic, for its innovative format was worlds away from the realistic, sociologically based fiction Hicks had championed for nearly half a century. Therefore the critic began discussing what he did know: that the year before he and a student audience at Notre Dame had heard Kurt Vonnegut deliver "as funny a lecture as I had ever...

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