Kurt Vonnegut’s home town of Indianapolis officially misses him, and to prove it they’re having “The Year of Vonnegut” this year, full of “events and activities to honor Vonnegut and his contributions to American literature and art.” Mayor Bart Peterson says that Vonnegut “mixed dark humor with critical thinking and impacted the way many view the society we live in.”
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IOW, don’t let the kiddies actually READ that stuff. Vonnegut may suffer the same unattractive fate as Edgar Lee Masters, who grew up downstate, became a Chicago attorney, and wrote one immortal book — Spoon River Anthology — for which his former neighbors excoriated him. Now their great-grandchildren have made him part of the local fall tourist package.
On the other side, in Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut also quotes Masters’s “Knowlt Hoheimer,” and concludes with a hubristic scientific experiment freezing solid almost everyone and everything on earth. At that point the holy man Bokonon offers advice to the book’s main character:
