The Royal Kidnapping by J. Jack Bergeron

Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, titled Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008.

After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society. Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). He published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which ( The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle ) were nominated for the Hugo Award for best SF or fantasy novel of the year.

The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful at the time. Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau. He adopted his nephews after his sister died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works further collections have been published after his death.īorn and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. Kurt Vonnegut ( / ˈ v ɒ n ɪ ɡ ə t/ Novem– April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels.

The Royal Kidnapping by J. Jack Bergeron