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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...

[Player Piano] intends to startle us with something sinister. Aspiring toward moral autonomy violates the order of creation. In grabbing for the complete freedom of God, the technological mind abuses the freedom God has given the human creature to share in life within limitations. The consequence of this overreaching is the degradation and oppression felt by all the figures in the story. In Player Piano humanity lives under the curse brought about by its own arrogance. The novels that follow take the reader...

It is a growing awareness of the seriousness of Vonnegut's inquiries which has made people realize that he is not only the science fiction writer he first appeared to be. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), was, to be sure, a fairly orthodox futuristic satire on the dire effects on human individuality of the fully mechanised society which technology could make possible. A piano player is a man consciously using a machine to produce aesthetically pleasing patterns of his own making. A player-piano i...

The thrust of Vonnegut's fiction has moved from detached, ironic observation to impassioned participation. His early works, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, were concerned with the external environment—the dangers of technology and the glorification of the machine. He also evinced a marked concern with the relationship between destiny and fate, but the detached tone of his novels made it difficult to penetrate the layers of ambivalence. In Mother Night, Vonnegut began to concern himself m...