Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kurt and Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut. Vonnegut's father was a suc­cessful architect, and his mother's family ran an equally successful brewery. However, the onset of Prohibition, followed by the Great Depression, as well as anti-German sentiment in the wake of World War I, put the Vonnegut family under se­vere economic and social distress. As an under­graduate at Cornell, Vonnegut wrote articles for the school newspaper opposing American entry into World War II. After Pearl Harbor, however, Von­negut put aside his reservations about the war and joined the U.S. Army in January, l943. World War II saw his family's fortunes sink even lower, lead­ing to his mother's suicide in May, l944. Vonnegut was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. In February, 1945, while in a German prison camp, he witnessed the...