Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (born 1922) is acknowledged as a major voice in American literature and applauded for his pungent satirical depictions of modern society. Emphasizing the comic absurdity of the human condition, he frequently depicts characters who sear...

[This entry was updated by Peter J. Reed (University of Minnesota) from his entry in DLB 152: American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series.] Though Kurt Vonnegut had been a widely read short-story writer throughout the 1950s and though his novels...

As of 1987 Kurt Vonnegut's work includes twelve novels, a play and a television play, two collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and a miscellany of uncollected shorter pieces of fiction and nonfiction. He is himself the subject of a nu...

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 06-15-2007 Aniston as a singing jailbird THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Date: 06-15-2007, Friday Section: BETTER LIVING Edtion: All Editions Column: FILM NOTES Jennifer Aniston is tuning up a period musical at DreamWorks titled "Goree...

The D.C. Zoning Commission has spoken. After numerous public hearings, the panel voted 4-0 Monday against building a low-security prison on federal land in Southwest, saying development of a prison would conflict with the city's long-range development plans, upset the environmental balance and...

Lindsay Lohan was a jailbird for just 84 minutes Thursday, becoming the latest celebrity to serve less than a day for a drunken driving offense.Lohan, 21, turned herself in to the Los Angeles County women's detention center in Lynwood at 10:30 a.m. She was searched,...

Ordinarily, a rotund grandfather shopping for watermelon in a supermarket wouldn't get a second look. Carlos Landin Martinez, however, had two bodyguards with him, and an off-duty drug agent buying food for a family barbecue knew why.Landin led two parallel lives: a quiet retiree who...

What we have in Jailbird is an extremely closely woven narrative built up of ironic juxtapositions and incongruities stated and counterpointed as in an elaborate symphony. The development of character in terms of psychological realism is not important to Vonnegut (though a Dickensian presentation of idiosyncracy is) and in fact some of his characters' names are close anagrams of one another—Leland Clewes/Cleveland Lawes; Arpad Lean/Delmar Peale—as though to suggest that their personalit...

[In Jailbird] Vonnegut's manner, as usual, is jokey and faux naïf. He writes about serious matters—labour massacres and judicial murder in America—without the slightest risk of earnestness. Yet underneath the comedy, Vonnegut is still indignant at capitalism and bitter over the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, wondering a little ruefully why the story of their martyrdom has been forgotten…. Vonnegut's voice does not falter; like the master raconteur he is, the ...

Beneath the absurd comedy of [Jailbird] with its chance encounters and unlikely coincidences exists a dark undertone of satiric comment on the loneliness, corruption and impersonality of American society. RAMJAC and Watergate are central symbols of our existing economic and political evils. Vonnegut's heroes are the little people like Mary Kathleen and such political martyrs as Sacco and Vanzetti (reminding one of Dos Passos's U.S.A., a probable influence on Vonnegut). As Mary Kathleen says ab...