Wrapping Up

Kurt Vonnegut in August 2006, less than a year before his death.

Here's a collection of obituaries and tributes to Vonnegut filed after his death in April 2007. While we won't have the luxury of setting aside an entire class for these, they might help frame your experience of his work this term, and also sharpen your ideas for your final:

• The New York Times

• The Guardian

• The Los Angeles Times

• The San Francisco Chronicle (an obit written many years before KV's death)

• NPR's Morning Edition remembers Vonnegut

• Time Magazine

• The Washington Post

Finally, here's one of Vonnegut's last televised interviews, with PBS' NOW in 2005:

So it goes, and you go as well, from the confines of this class on to (I dare to hope) a life-long relationship with literature. There are two types of students during winter break: those who are glad not to have to look at books for a month and those who are excited to finally have the time and freedom to pursue their own reading interests. Despite having read so much Vonnegut over the past calendar year I'm eager to read more — maybe Hocus Pocus, and my partner just got me Ginger Strand's book on the brothers Vonnegut during their time at GE — and perhaps you are as well. While Galápagos serves as a fitting summation to our semester, Timequake is his actual final novel, and it's no more or less thorny and interesting than Breakfast of Champions (which we read in its place). Bluebeard is also quite a rewarding read, especially if you liked the books in the second half of the term.

You might want to consider the short story collections as well. I did consider using Welcome to the Monkey House for this class, but my feeling was that a) it can be difficult for students to transition from the macro-scale of novels to the micro-scale of stories, and b) those stories are conceived more for popular audiences, so they're not quite as substantive as Vonnegut's other writing. If you're interested in some short attention span delights, however, there are several additional volumes, including Bagombo Snuff Box and the two posthumous editions published in recent years. What might be a better place to go are the volumes of essays, speeches, interviews, etc.: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; Fates Worse than Death; or a particular favorite: A Man Without a Country.

Also, since it's been such a good resource for us over the course of the semester you might want to take a look at Charles J. Shields wonderful biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut — A Life. Be forewarned that while it's a fantastically thorough document of the author's life and times, and provides all sorts of useful background on Vonnegut, his family, his writing process and much more, it doesn't spare you from the full brunt of Vonnegut's personality, which is sometimes less than lovable. I think you're probably ready for that now, however. Likewise, I can happily recommend Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels, which I've been reading alongside the books this term.