Vonnegut, K

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jon stewart big vonnegut fan interview before died, squigle caricature sent by son post mort

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Bruce Severy, a full-bearded, idealistic 26-year-old, moved from Southern California in 1973 to the small town of Drake, North Dakota, where he had accepted a job teaching English at the public high school. He, his small family and their menagerie of pets settled into a large, white frame house across from the school.

Severy’s progressive bent showed in the curriculum he taught. Insisting that his students should learn “how to think, not what to think,” he assigned his sophomore literature class contemporary fiction to read, including Kurt Vonnegut’s

“Slaughterhouse-Five,” a strange and quirky anti-war novel published four years prior.

While Severy chose works that he believed could help his students make sense of the problems confronting society, they clashed with the conservative values of his new home. A parent eventually complained about profanity in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” In November 1976, the Drake school board voted unanimously to remove the book from school premises. School officials told students to turn in their copies, and their lockers were searched if they refused. The district went on to burn 32 copies of the novel in the school furnace.

As a Vonnegut scholar, I’m fascinated by the backlash to “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which is now widely taught in high schools and colleges across the country. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighed in on Vonnegut’s novel, there are direct parallels between that controversy and the politics of school censorship cases today, which continue to target “Slaughterhouse-Five,” among countless other works.

Vonnegut responds

News of what happened in Drake spread quickly in the press. Those who objected to the school board’s actions made comparisons to Nazi book burnings. The school district’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that the superintendent’s last name was Fuhrman – evoking Adolf Hitler’s formal title, Führer – and the school board chairman’s last name was McCarthy, reminding the public of Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist senator who sought to purge and censor Americans from all walks of life.

When Kurt Vonnegut learned of the case, he was both angry and saddened.

In a letter to the Drake school board, he insisted his books were “not sexy” and did not argue “in favor of wildness of any kind.” Instead, “they beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.” He informed the board that he was a decorated World War II veteran who had fought against nations that hate books and burn them. He never received a reply.

The North Dakota incident, while the most egregious attempt to censor Vonnegut, was not the only case of its kind.

As “Slaughterhouse-Five” made its way into high school and college curricula, it faced a backlash by parents and school boards who argued the novel was obscene and immoral. Its irreverent treatment of Christianity was deemed blasphemous, while its unsparing portrayal of the U.S. military’s bombing of Dresden, Germany, was condemned as anti-American.

The book has been challenged as recently as January 2026, when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Vonnegut’s estate after Utah’s “sensitive materials law” gave school districts a mechanism to ban the novel.

The Supreme Court weighs in

Censorship cases involving “Slaughterhouse-Five” are complex because they have occurred almost entirely in high schools rather than colleges. Schools must balance their responsibility to decide what material is appropriate for younger students with students’ First Amendment rights to receive information and ideas.

One important case dealing with these issues made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1976, several board members from the Island Trees School district in Long Island, New York, reacting to a list of “inappropriate” titles publicized by a conservative activist group, objected to 11 books held in the districts’ school libraries or included in the curriculum.

Seven of the books were written by authors from minority ethnic or religious groups, including titles as seemingly inoffensive as “Best Stories of Negro Writers,” edited by Langston Hughes, and the young adult novel “A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich” by Alice Childress.

The 11th book on the list was “Slaughterhouse-Five.” At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read excerpts from the novel out loud, focusing on a passage where one of Vonnegut’s characters, Kilgore Trout, reimagines the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Trout claims that this revised story actually offered a better moral than the original Gospel story: It teaches people to be kind to everyone, not just the well connected.

Martin, however, declared that even if the rest of the book told the best story in the world, he wouldn’t want it in the school library “with this stuff in it.”

Five high school students, led by 17-year-old Steven Pico, soon filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming the book removal was unconstitutional and that their First Amendment rights to freely receive information had been violated. The case wended its way through the lower courts for years, before it came to the Supreme Court in 1982.

Board of Education v. Pico was a tangled case. The justices wrote seven separate opinions and did not definitively settle the First Amendment issues. But a 5-4 majority did determine in favor of the students who argued that their case should have received a full trial rather than a summary judgment years ago.

As the only Supreme Court case to date involving censorship in school libraries, Pico, while a limited ruling, did set out general guidelines still used today.

The decision affirmed that school districts have the authority to supervise the education of students in their care and may remove materials that are, in the words of Justice William Brennan, “pervasively vulgar” or educationally unsuitable.

But such a decision may not be based on a school district’s objections to the ideas expressed in the books. Books may not be removed on narrowly partisan or political grounds, and removal must comply with the “transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.”

Book banning today

Despite the fact that the justices ruled that books cannot be banned on partisan or political grounds, book banning has been on the rise in America since 2020.

The literary and free speech advocacy group PEN America documented 2,532 instances of book bans in public schools in 2021–22. That figure rose to 3,362 in 2022–23 and nearly tripled to 10,046 in 2023–24.

Since then, the numbers have dipped somewhat but are still alarmingly high.

Surprisingly, many of the school censorship cases today still focus on the same old issues affecting “Slaughterhouse-Five” over 50 years ago – profanity, sexual content and violence. John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” has been the most frequently banned book in schools since 2021, mostly because of a brief, awkward sexual encounter between two main characters.

But fiction and memoirs focusing on gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues have increasingly become targets of censorship, abetted by right-wing parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty. George M. Johnson’s memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and Maia Kobabe’s autobiographical graphic novel “Gender Queer” are among the most banned books in schools in recent years.

And like the majority of the books banned in the Pico case, books by Black authors remain high on the list of school censorship cases. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” appears among the top 10 banned books since 2021, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” comes in at No. 26. Ironically, “Beloved” was also named the single best work of American fiction since 1980 in a 2006 poll of writers and literary critics.

Kurt Vonnegut believed in and argued for First Amendment rights his whole career. In 1976 he told students at Connecticut College that language and literature were “holy” to him. He thought schools should make a point of exposing children to all sorts of opinions and information to make them better citizens.

But he wasn’t too hopeful. Arguing against book banning, he wearily concluded, was like “attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans.” The Conversation

Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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DeSantis’ Florida is big on book bans, removing from schools books with LGBTQ characters, books about civil rights, books questioning American exceptionalism, books that tell painful truths about the world.

Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner,” Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Judy Blume’s “Forever,” and Anne Frank’s “Diary” have all been challenged or deep-sixed by parents and school boards who want to suppress stories that might deepen and complicate students’ knowledge of the country they live in or expand their understanding of ways to be human.

In Escambia County, they’ve yanked the dictionary off the shelf.

Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.

Halvorssen produced The Sugar Babies,^[60] a film about human trafficking in the Dominican Republic and the plight of its migrant farm workers. The targets of the documentary are wealthy and politically connected sugar barons who live in West Palm Beach: The Fanjul Family.^[63] The film previewed at Florida International University where a heated exchange with the Dominican diplomatic envoy resulted in police presence. It received numerous negative reviews claiming the film's portrayal of big business and its relationship with the Dominican government was part of a campaign against the country's reputation. Death threats against the film's director and a bribery scandal involving the Dominican embassy have made the film a subject of intense media interest.^[64][65][66]

He is listed as sole producer of 2081, the film adaptation of author Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron", a dystopian film about a future in which a tyrannical government arrests, imprisons without trial, and tortures those who disagree with the government policy of enforced sterilization and enforced handicapping. It premiered at the Seattle Film Festival and stars Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson, Julie Hagerty, James Cosmo, and Armie Hammer. The film's music was composed by Lee Brooks and recorded by Kronos Quartet.

early novel anti-mccarthyism

Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers.^[41] Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom".^[42] Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War misunderstandings of communism and socialism.^[42]

With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time".^[43] The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, ice-9, solid water stable at room temperature, and if a particle of it is dropped in water, all of it becomes ice-9. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted), give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-9, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to have himself and his story survive.^[44][45]

vonnegutltr

Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 Letter to the Future More Relevant Today Than Ever Before

Kick Kennedy

In 1988, my then Hyannis Port neighbor the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prescient letter to the Earth's planetary citizens of 2088 for Volkswagen's TIME magazine ad campaign. His seven points of advice are perhaps more relevant today than at any time in human history. We should keep this advice in mind this election year and adopt Vonnegut's recommendations while we still can.

Kurt Vonnegut

Daniele Prati, via Flickr Commons

Here's his letter:

Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'This above all: to thine own self be true'? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: 'Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come'?

The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.'

Our century hasn't been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America.

Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn't do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

Yes, and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love—and then double in size again.

On second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have done about too many people for too small a food supply.

And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?

Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

Reduce and stabilize your population.

Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

And so on. Or else.

Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.

Cheers,

Kurt Vonnegut

http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Vonnegutltr