A Writer’s Roots: Kurt Vonnegut’s Indianapolis

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'A

Writer's Roots

Kurt Vonnegut's Indianapolis' is made possible through the generous support of...

clicking of typewriter keys

MAN

When things are going well sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud 'If this isn't [Nice, Nice, Very Nice by Ambrosia] Nice, Nice, Very Nice. Nice, Nice, Very Nice. So many people

WOMAN ON PHONE

I think all of his work addresses universal

BOB SEELBACH

The problem of man's inhumanity to man His voice seemed to say, 'Why are we doing this? Why do we do this to each

MICHAEL POTTER

You know, in a of our other contributions haven't. You can go anywhere in the country and anywhere in the world and people know Kurt

MAN 2

Well, I would say that he ranks up there with Twain. I mean Twain was a voice in his particular century and I think Vonnegut was a voice in his particular century and I think history will probably treat them almost the same. MARK SHULLENBERGER/TEACHER: Exactly, but what is the subtext? What's Vonnegut suggesting?

STUDENT

Here Fred really recalls how a woman praised him and she spoke title God Bless, You, Mr. Rosewater. MARK SHULLENBERGER/TEACHER: Excellent.

STUDENT 2

Basically, Rosewater, the foundation and the corporation and there money um corrupted this entire, their

MARC ALLAN

You know, Slaughterhouse-Five is in the Top 20-considered in the Top 20 greatest thing-novels written in So he gets some respect. he was happy with what he did. And he influenced a lot of writers to write short and smart.

JOHN GREEN

I'm a huge Vonnegut fan. I have been since I was 15 or 16 I met him my senior year of high school at the University of And the way he talked about story and the way he talked about writing and a creative life was hugely important to me.

NARRATOR

John Green spends his creative life in Indianapolis, writing bestsellers including "The Fault in Our Stars,"

JOHN GREEN

Well, Vonnegut is a far better writer than I'll ever be.

MARC LEEDS

It won't be remarkable when you take a reading Voltaire and you're Vonnegut.

NARRATOR

And there's no question that Vonnegut was not only a serious author, he was a successful one, too. Slaughterhouse-Five rocketed to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. The Vonnegut books that followed also made the list. Along the way Kurt Vonnegut evolved from niche author to more than a bestseller.

PROF SUSAN NEVILLE

Just yesterday in the New York Times, Judd Apatow, was saying that if asked in the Times was who would you like to have over for a And one of the three was Kurt Vonnegut.

JAMES ALEXANDER THOM

He was as famous as a movie star, practically.

scene from Back to School

JAMES ALEXANDER THOM

You've got a paper due on Kurt read the book. I just don't understand him. Then, how are you going to Hi, I'm Kurt Vonnegut, I'm I comedian Craig Ferguson, when he air, somebody asked him in an interview, was there anybody that you ever wanted to have on your show that never got on. He said, 'Well, the first guest I wanted to have was Kurt quite a bit of a culture figure

NANETTE VONNEGUT

I said, Oh, the guy was sitting in a metal He fell over. That's a memory.

JOHN KRULL

And we'd be walking through mid-town New make it a religion of being with Kurt, and part like Mark Twain, because his appearance was so distinctive with that Brillo pad on top of his head and the hang dog mustache and all that, literally, we would walk down the street and people

NARRATOR

And rockin'. The rock band Ambrosia took a passage from Cat's Cradle and turned it into a song. [Nice, Nice, Very Nice by Ambrosia] Oh a sleeping drunkard, up in Central Park. And the lion hunter in the jungle dark.

And a Chinese dentist and the British Queen. They all fit together in the same machine. Nice, Nice, very nice. Nice, nice, very nice.

So many people Rock and roll, popular movies, best selling books, and even respect in the literary community. But Kurt Vonnegut was a complicated man who remembered when he didn't sell many books, when he didn't feel he got the respect he deserved. A hero of the counter-culture who bristled at talk of being the spokesman of a generation.

KURT VONNEGUT

And people who try to lessen the impact of what I talk about is pacifism or compassion. kids.' Well, I am like hell, my mail is from college professors and

NARRATOR

An anti-war voice of the 60s was also part of the establishment and yet, Indiana was part of him.

DAN WAKEFIELD

I edited the book of his letters and I was correspondence all his life with high school, from General Electric, his first job. He was just very considerate and he was especially helpful to writers and especially helpful to me.

MORELY SAFER

Kurt had become You know, True Blue. connection. treasures our musicians, our stands right there with them, I think. And for somebody who's putting words together for a living,

JULIA WHITEHEAD

The Vonnegut Family was, all through the generations, through Kurt's generation, they were very influential in Indianapolis.

MORELY SAFER

And very proud of his family roots there.

NARRATOR

Those roots were deep, sunk decades before Kurt, Junior took his place in the fourth generation of Indianapolis Vonneguts.

WILLIAM SELM

The patriarch of the Vonnegut Family is Clemens Vonnegut. Clemens Vonnegut comes to Indianapolis in the very early He's not a penniless immigrant. He comes to New York as a manufacturer's representative. And then he makes his way to Indianapolis because he has a classmate here.

He goes in business with his classmate, uh, dry goods. So what Vonnegut does is shift them from dry goods to hardware. And then he builds, really an empire, a family business which endures for over 100 years and becomes a household name for everyone in Indianapolis because they manufacture hardware, wholesale hardware and they have retail stores throughout the city.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Very involved with creating more of the German-American culture of Indianapolis. He was a member of the school board. There's actually a school board in Indianapolis named after

WILLIAM SELM

Clemens Vonnegut is one of several of these liberal-minded Germans who are also very successful businessmen, too, who want to then bring in culture here where they see it's culturally devoid. So what did they do? They founded choral societies, They founded the Turnverein, the Most Germans are going to church. He's not because he proclaims himself a free thinker and with the free-thinker movement, he essentially embraces ideas of the enlightenment, which is being rational.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

And he instructions and morals about, should be and that of course affected the way Kurt Vonnegut,

NARRATOR

Clemens was prolific in another way. He and his wife, Katarina, had four sons. Clemens, Junior, Franklin and George all worked in the hardware store or related businesses. But not Bernard, born in 18-55, just a few years after the business began.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

He went to

NARRATOR

After an apprenticeship in New York, Bernard came home to Indianapolis and joined fellow architect Arthur Bohn to form the firm, Vonnegut and Bohn. And out of that partnership came some of the most imposing and impressive buildings of the Hoosier State Capital's late 19th and early 20th Centuries. LS Ayres and William H. Block.

Also, the Omni Severin Hotel If there's one building Hoosiers connect with the Vonnegut family, it's this one.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

In 1898, the Athenaeum Building was German

NARRATOR

In the Indianapolis of the mid-to-late 19th Century, successful Germans married other successful Germans. Bernard married Nanette Schnull. Her father was Henry Schnull.

WILLIAM SELM

So he's the father of the wholesale district. Very well the merchant prince of Meridian Street.

NARRATOR

Bernard and Nanette had three children... the eldest, born in 18-84, they named Kurt. He followed his father, first to MIT, and then into his father's firm. He helped found the Indianapolis Children's Museum, from its humble beginnings in a carriage house.

He even designed "Sidney the Seahorse," the museum's first logo. Bernard died in 19-08, only 53 years old. Kurt joined two years later and soon after, he fell in love with a beautiful woman he had known since childhood,who also happened to be from, another wealthy German family. Just look at Edith Lieber, tall, about 5-8, auburn haired, perfect complexion.

Her father, Albert, earned his Kurt Senior and Edith joined other Vonneguts as they were launched into the best of Indianapolis society and what everyone thought was a promising November 11, 1922. A son is born to Kurt and Edith Lieber Vonnegut. Kay, as his family called him, arrives four years to the day after Hoosiers marked the end of World War One with spontaneous celebrations on the Circle, and on Washington Street, just down Kurt, Junior joins eight-year old Bernard and five-year old Alice at their parents' brand new home on North Illinois Street, with the stained glass windows, wide open spaces, and their own take on the arts and crafts movement. The Vonneguts had indeed arrived, taking their rightful Kurt Vonnegut is a busy architect who also has time to volunteer for civic projects.

Edith is in several social clubs. They host dinner parties with artists and society guests.

PATTY COCHRAN

They were also members of the symphony and the art association and everything and cultural.

NARRATOR

And their kids go to Orchard, a private, progressive school where Kurt made friends with Ben Hitz and Jane Cox.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Kurt's early life was a life of privilege. His family was very wealthy for Indianapolis, especially. They had servants. He had a nanny named Ida Young.

And she taught Kurt Bible passages and she was really more of a mother to Kurt than his own

NARRATOR

But he was always close with his siblings. Bernard was the tinkerer, early radio pioneer and budding scientist, even as a boy. Alice or Allie, who grew up tall and beautiful, was creative, and an audience for Kay's jokes and During Prohibition, many breweries went under, including the Lieber's. So a big source of Kurt and Edith's wealth, her millionaire father Albert's brewery, was But for now, the good life continues.

Prestige travel, high society, good schools. And a good, safe home where everybody could be creative and The place that left the most profound mark on young Kurt Vonnegut was in Indiana but it was not Indianapolis.

actor reading

NARRATOR

I made my first mental maps of the world when I was a little child in the summertime on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee, which is in northern Indiana, halfway between Chicago and It was a place for childhood exploration within the safety of family, lots of

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Kurt loved his time at Lake Maxinkuckee.

actor reading

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Maxinkuckee is three miles long and two and a half miles across at its widest. Its shores are a closed loop. No matter where I was on its circumference, all I had to do was keep walking in one direction to find my way home again. What a confident Marco Polo I could be when setting out for a day's adventure.

The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family's unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake but to four adjacent cottages, teeming with

JEFF KENNEY

Lake Maxinkuckee is the second largest natural lake in the state of Indiana. It's 88 feet at its deepest. In fact, not far off the Vonnegut area, off the point here, is actually the deepest part of the lake.

NARRATOR

And young Kurt Vonnegut Junior swam across its two-and-a-half mile breadth.

JEFF KENNEY

It's a significant swim. And again, he describes actually swimming it naked, with family members kind of cheering him on in a boat as he went, which was sort of a family tradition. And in a December 1977 letter to his cousin, Katie Rasmussen, he

writes

'It is good that you're keeping the Maxinkuckee dream alive. That will always be an enchanting body of water to me, my Aegean Sea, perfect in every dimension.

NARRATOR

Kurt didn't realize at the time that his neighbors were the leading literary lights of his parents' generation. They summered at Lake Maxinkuckee. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington stayed with friends And the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley of "Little Orphant Annie" and "Frost on the Pumpkin" fame would join them. Meredith Nicholson used the backdrop of Culver Academies, then Culver Military Academy as inspiration for "The House of a Thousand Candles," the bestselling novel of 1906.

JEFF KENNEY

There's this literary air about the place. [Anything Goes, by Cole Porter] In olden days, a glimpse of stocking. Was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows,

NARRATOR

And there was music, too, provided by a young piano Writing prose

JEFF KENNEY

And often he would, he would play piano after Culver Military Academy's

NARRATOR

Kurt attended some of those dances years later, even though he did not go to school there. Looking back, he wrote that he did not like the regimentation of military life. But that did not stop him from socializing alongside the midshipmen and troopers who were The Vonnegut era is long gone on the east shore. But some academies' alumni have preserved Kurt's great-uncle Clemens Junior's cottage.

MAN

The biggest thing was just keeping it as it was. No paint. The shabby chic look, just is keeping everything like an old

NARRATOR

Kurt spent less and less time here as he got older and his family situation changed.

actor reading

NARRATOR

Am I sad? Not at all. Because everything about that lake was imprinted on my mind when it held so little and was so eager for information, it will be my lake as long as I The last summer idyll for the Kurt Vonnegut family branch was in 19-29. Kurt, Alice and Bernard headed back to school that fall Orchard for Kurt and the Twenties continued to roar until late [Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?] Why should I be standing in line.

Wall Street laid its egg and the Great Depression began.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

So Kurt had begun kindergarten, first grade at the Orchard School and when the family's financial situation changed, Kurt was taken out of Orchard School. private schools because of the with those friends. So he went to James Whitcomb Riley elementary school. For Kurt, it didn't matter whether it was public or private school.

His elementary school was a very good school.

NANETTE VONNEGUT

He waxed nostalgic about his childhood and about his siblings. He really didn't talk about his parents very much, there was a real kind of blackout in that area.

NARRATOR

And no wonder. His father's business evaporated. His mother, accustomed to luxury and the best of society, was forced to cut back on entertaining, and then, on the household staff of servants, and eventually, the house itself. Their showplace on the north side, home to dinner parties with artists and much of Indianapolis high society, became too expensive to maintain.

The beer money, Edith's inheritance, was long gone. And Kurt, Senior wasn't bringing in new income. So they moved to a new but smaller and less expensive place in the Williams Creek section of Indianapolis.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Kurt went to Shortridge High School and he

PATTY COCHRAN

He sort of

VIC JOSE

He did very well in school, although he was not a top student. He's a very typical Midwestern

KURT VONNEGUT

In this wonderful high school I went to, Shortridge, we had a daily paper. It had a daily paper so long my parents had worked on the Shortridge Daily Echo. And so a whole lot of writers came out of Shortridge-the head writer of the I Love Lucy show, Madelyn Pugh-I knew her when she was a student. Dan Wakefield, brother novelist and journalist, came out of there.

DAN WAKEFIELD

It was a great tradition at Shortridge. It was an honor to have a daily high school paper.

NARRATOR

Of course, it wasn't

JULIA WHITEHEAD

There were many clubs, some were formal, some were just informal clubs that just popped up. One that Kurt joined was called the Owls club and that was a lifelong group of his friends.

VIC JOSE

As a friend, he was a real friend. He was not a person who put on airs.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

So tall and lanky. He wasn't any athlete. He was a fantastic dancer. Back when people did that much more frequently than they do now.

He enjoyed dancing.

MAJIE FAILEY

And he loved we were kids that's where all the parties were. All the dances were at

NARRATOR

But young Kurt wasn't just a ballroom dancer he immersed himself in the outdoors. He joined the Prairie Trek in 1937 an annual summer adventure out west celebrating nature, archeology and Indian lore organized by former Boy Scout leader Hillis Howie. Lifelong friend Ben Hitz was on the expedition with him. Sam Sherwood and Kurt Vonnegut, Junior, both of Indianapolis, were among the group.

He could afford to take the trek in the midst of the Depression because his father designed the cabins that Howie would build the following year Back at Shortridge, Kurt became more popular as an upper classman as classmates learned to appreciate his sense of humor

PATTY COCHRAN

He wrote plays and skits and things. I think he was always very appreciated by his own age people. He was so popular, tremendously, wasn't he?

NARRATOR

Yes and no. There's a frequently reported story that some athletes grabbed Kurt and stuffed him into a garbage can in school. It was not a friendly prank.

WAKEFIELD

And in fact, a couple of those guys resented him even when he came back to get some award from his class. Somebody had made a sculpture of him which is now in the Athenaeum in the Vonnegut Room and these two football players refused to attend a class function where he was being honored. That was like 60 years later or something. So, as he would say, 'so it goes.

NARRATOR

And so went the world in the fall of 1939 as Kurt and friends began their senior year. The Germans blitzed Poland and World War Two erupted. But America did not enter the war for two years... So Kurt

could savor his time

as co-editor of the Daily Echo on the student council with cousin Mary Glossbrenner and as a finalist for something Shortridge called the "Uglyman contest" which was really a crowning of the most popular boy in the school. His buddy, Vic Jose was another finalist. Kurt and his friends made their mark on Shortridge and the school remained a major influence on Kurt the rest of

NARRATOR

The Owls and other friends scattered across the country in the fall of 1940 many heading to colleges out east. But Kurt went to Butler University, right? That's the old rumor.

SUSAN NEVILLE

It's on his for a brief moment, he got C's He was told that his work was

JULIA WHITEHEAD

To which Kurt responded, that's great, I'm

NARRATOR

The Butler registrar confirms he attended Butler alright, but in the Summer of '42, between semesters at Cornell. Butler says it doesn't release information on classes taken or grades earned.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

But he ended up going to Cornell University. He studied chemistry.

NARRATOR

Kurt later said that was the only way his father would let him go to college is if he studied something "useful." His father insisted no architecture to avoid his fate and nothing in the humanities.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

His father had wanted him to study science very much like his brother Bernard. But Kurt, he just wasn't as interested in his science courses and didn't do quite as well.

NARRATOR

It harkened back to when family lore says his grandfather, Bernard, cried when he worked at the hardware store all the while dreaming of being an artist.

NANETTE VONNEGUT

He knew for him when he went to Cornell. He probably was.... I think he just threw, gave up, just stopped going to those classes and worked at the newspaper all the time.

NARRATOR

He wrote a humor column for the Cornell Daily Sun and eventually became an editor. But he couldn't stay in the college cocoon forever.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Pearl Harbor had been bombed at that point. And Kurt during his university experience had pneumonia so he originally got a draft deferment. But then he decided he wanted to serve his country and do his part and he did enlist in the Army.

NARRATOR

It was the spring of 1943.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

This was very upsetting to his family, especially his mother, who had hoped that if he was going to be in the military, that he would have become an officer and would have gone a little different route. So he was sent to Carnegie University and then the University of Tennessee, where he studied engineering. And unfortunately, he was pulled away from the University of Tennessee by the Army and sent to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, just down the road from us. He was able to come and visit his friends and family here in Indianapolis.

He made such a visit on Mother's Day.

NARRATOR

It was May 14, 1944. Kurt, Senior and Edith were practically empty-nesters Their eldest son, Bernard, had earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at M-I-T and had gotten married. Daughter, Alice, too, was recently married but husband James Adams was in the military so she stayed with her parents.

The elder Vonnegut's business never recovered from the Great Depression and neither did Edith. She wrote short stories and submitted them to magazines-one more attempt to restore the family's fortune.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

His mother, who had abused alcohol and prescription drugs really as a way for her to cope with her depression and anxiety related to the loss of the family fortune during the Great Depression and after that, and then, with the start of the war.

PATTY COCHRAN

She killed herself. I don't know why.

NANETTE VONNEGUT

The older I get, the more I find I take an interest in clarifying details around people's lives, in particular women, because often

there's one liners

'died in childbirth or was crazy or committed suicide on Mother's Day." Wow. That is a mouthful, and I've had to think about it, like, wow, if a mother chose Mother's Day to kill herself, that's a really, really mean thing to do. It's a statement. So I just didn't quite buy it.

I would rather leave it at whether she committed suicide or not, any day is a bad day for a suicide.

KURT VONNEGUT

See, there's a strong reason not to commit suicide. Because you leave that as a legacy to those who survive you, particularly your children, because it will SEEM like one

NARRATOR

The young Kurt Vonnegut of 1944 had to confront this horrible tragedy right before he was to leave Camp Atterbury and ship out for For the rest of his life, he maintained mixed feelings about his mother in a self-interview he published, crediting her as his greatest influence as a writer but in a family tree he drew, describing her as a A creature of the arts, beautiful, elegant. She left him, just as he headed for the biggest conflagration in

JULIA WHITEHEAD

And now he is with an infantry division, which he was not expecting and he knew that probably didn't mean anything good for him because he was shipped off to Europe with new his unit.

KURT VONNEGUT

When my generation went to war, we had two fears, equal. One, we might get killed, two, we might have to kill somebody. Equally terrible. Terrible thing to kill somebody.

NARRATOR

In December, 1944, Kurt Vonnegut was an infantry scout out front of a new division that had not been battle-tested. The 106th was supposed to cover more than 20 miles 10-thousand men spread across a mountain-side in western Germany. Their line bulged deep into Germany which means after being in-country for only 10 days, they were among the first to get hit by Germany's last big

KURT VONNEGUT

The Battle of the Bulge. The Germans had superior technology, much better weapons. And we were just kids and we wound up... they sent the best they had, everything they had, the best tanks, everything, unexpectedly.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

He is pretty much immediately captured by the Nazis. He is marched in the snow 60 miles to a train that takes him into the city of Dresden.

KURT VONNEGUT

And so I was ragged, I was hungry. I had seen a lot of people die and I had had the hell shelled out of us. And I was just a kid and when it was all over, there were Americans like this, as far as they eye could see. Kids.

JULIA WHITEHEAD

You know, I think obviously he suffered tremendously, not only his personal suffering of being a prisoner of war and how that all came about. And while he was on that train to Dresden and the RAF had fired on that train and killed 150

NARRATOR

Private Vonnegut was assigned to forced labor in Dresden, a city he remembered for its art and architecture the

JULIA WHITEHEAD

He at that point is put underground in Slaughterhouse-Five where a number of other prisoners were

NARRATOR

February 13th, 1945. Allied bombers fire-bomb Dresden, leaving the medieval city in ruins and killing as

JULIA WHITEHEAD

Then Kurt was tasked with burying the women, the children, the elderly people, the pets most of the men are off fighting in the war.

NARRATOR

The survivors were understandably hostile and the work, grueling. But Russian soldiers freed Kurt and his fellow captives less than three months later. There's Kurt, inside the wagon, a newly freed man. Soon after this picture was taken, he wrote a letter home.

It described his experiences and signaled that a young writer had found his voice. His father read it aloud at the Portfolio C lub in Indianapolis.

ACTOR READING

Under the Geneva Convention officers and non-commissioned officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am as you know a private. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles, I told the guard just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came.

They beat me up a little. I retired as group leader. One boy starved to death and the SS troops shot two stealing On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden, possibly the world's most beautiful city.

NARRATOR

Kurt Vonnegut, Junior prisoner-of-war, decorated soldier arrived back at Camp Atterbury in Indiana in July of 1945. He didn't dwell on his horrific recent past. Kay was eager to begin his life anew. He was barely home when he re-connected with someone he'd known since they were children at Orchard School.

Jane Cox had her own war adventure. After earning a degree in literature from Swarthmore, she went to Washington to work for the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA. In the summer of '45, Kurt proposed and she accepted. Kurt and Jane married on Part of their honeymoon included a return for Kurt to the old family cottage on Lake Maxinkuckee.

He kept up the breathtaking pace of life changing decisions. He and Jane chose graduate school at the University of Chicago she, for literature, and he in anthropology. They never lived in Indianapolis

DAN WAKEFIELD

I certainly couldn't have lived here and written Going All the Way. I think you have to leave in order to have a certain

NARRATOR

In Chicago, Kurt also spent a few months as a cub reporter for the City News Bureau. Jane quit school when she became pregnant with their first child, a boy they named Mark, for Vonnegut's literary hero, Mark Twain. And Kurt's professors rejected his master's thesis. Kurt said he needed to support his growing family so they moved to Schenectady, New York where brother Bernie had helped him get a job in public relations for his employer, General Electric.

But it was in Schenectady, when he wasn't on the clock, that Kurt Vonnegut, Junior began his writing career. And just like at the University of Chicago, he met with

JULIA WHITEHEAD

So this is from the Atlantic Monthly, April 25th, 1950. Dear Mr. Vonnegut, we are extremely sorry to have another negative verdict for you. Dear Mr.

Vonnegut, I was glad to read your story, To Dust Return. I'm sorry that I cannot write to you about it with enthusiasm. You have talent but I do not feel you show in this piece that you can write a short story which would be appealing to our markets.

NARRATOR

But Collier's editors found a Vonnegut short story they liked. "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" netted the young writer 750 dollars, about 7,000 today.

And good timing

Jane and Kurt's second child, Edith came along Early Vonnegut stories did not overtly conjure up Indiana people and places. Neither did his first novel, Player Piano, which earned a good review in the New York Times but didn't sell much. Eventually, with more stories sold, Vonnegut quit G-E and moved his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And so it went in the 50s a few stories sold and another baby, Nanette, or Nanny born in 19-54 and work on another novel 'The Sirens of Titan.' And more stories.

Then, personal tragedy struck again.. with the death of his father in Indiana in 19-57 and again and again, a year later. Just two days before his beloved sister, Alice, died of cancer her husband, James, was killed in a commuter train wreck in Bayonne, New Jersey.

NANETTE VONNEGUT

When we were here together in Indianapolis, he talked about Allie. He was triggered by being in Indianapolis. I watched that and the way he talked about Alice was really profound, the depth of love and sorrow and the missing. I just think he was pretty numb by life in some ways.

I mean, he could do a good ditty whatever, but when the real memories came back, it often came back to Allie and he said, 'God, she would have made a wonderful old woman.' And he also said, 'God, she was

NARRATOR

Jane and Kurt adopted the three eldest Adams boys putting six kids under one roof in Cape Cod. Maybe that numbness his daughter noticed helped. In the 60s, Kurt Vonnegut, survivor of so many tragedies in his life began to work those stories many with Hoosier ties into his books. He saved the most cataclysmic Kurt Vonnegut's experience in the war remained untold since he wrote his letter home in 1945.

Until 1969, when he created Billy Pilgrim, whose fantastical adventures Vonnegut told in a

MARC ALLAN READS

"Listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep as a senile widower, and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955, and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.

He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between, he says. Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next and the trips aren't

NARRATOR

Certainly not during the war. Billy Pilgrim survives the Battle of the Bulge and being a prisoner of war and Dresden. But there's also time for commentary on the human condition.

JOHN KRULL READS

"I look through the Gideon Bible in my hotel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zoar, I read. 'Then, the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire. The world was better off without them and Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been but she did look back and I love her for that because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure and had to be since it was written by a pillar of salt.

It begins like this

Listen Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck

in time and it ends like this

'Poo-tee-weet?' " What blows me away about this is he tells you how the story's going to end. He acknowledges failure at the beginning and defies you to stop reading and you don't stop reading.

NARRATOR

And the world agreed.

DAN WAKEFIELD

When Slaughterhouse-Five came out in 1969 and was an overnight success, a worldwide success, and there were lines around bookstores in every city to get his autograph when he was there. Except in Indianapolis. And I got a letter from him at that time and it was in the book of his letters and it simply said, "Dear Dan, I spent that afternoon at L.S. Ayres bookstore with Slaughterhouse-Five.

I have sold 11 copies, all of them to relatives. down to poor publicity. going on. I'm not sure.

Vonnegut was a household name for the hardware business but I do not recall general conversation among the masses about Vonnegut, the writer.

JOHN KRULL

Well, I think there was some ambivalence. I think for writers of his generation and Wakefield's, a perfect example of that, too, you look at Slaughterhouse-Five came out in 1969 and Going All the Way came out the following year. In the city where the author was born, you've got two of the hottest writers in the United States and neither one of them feels particularly welcome here.

PATTY COCHRAN

Yeah, his that he's so successful. But we don't really like his

DAN WAKEFIELD

He dedicated Sirens of Titan to an uncle who said he couldn't read it. They didn't understand or they didn't understand the humor or they didn't understand the satire. And also because he sometimes used words that most modern writers used but they were shocked. He had an aunt who had a bookstore in Louisville and she wouldn't carry Kurt's book because she felt they were not

NARRATOR

And yet, Kurt Vonnegut kept coming back to Indianapolis. He came back when a bust was dedicated and placed in the Athenaeum. He came back to see the then-brand new Indiana History Center. He also slipped in to see old And Kurt time tripped back to Indianapolis in his books more and more.

In autobiographical collections, such as Palm Sunday and Fates Worse Than Death and in the novel, Slapstick. For years, there were Vonnegut "sightings" in Indianapolis, often downtown, among the buildings designed by his grandfather and father... Nostalgia walked hand in glove with some of his frustrations with his hometown but he kept In 1997, Vonnegut published the novel, "Timequake" which gave us one more appearance of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut announced it would be his last novel.

JAMES ALEXANDER THOM

Now, the thing that brought him back to writing, of course, was when decided to go invading countries. "The Man Without a Country.

NARRATOR

Kurt Vonnegut was plenty angry about America's role in global politics long before 9-11.

KURT VONNEGUT

On our great victory in the Gulf-blowing the bejesus out of this third world country that hardly shot back. You didn't dare say anything bad about it.

NARRATOR

He also railed against what he saw as a wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping the country.

KURT VONNEGUT

You be stubborn and speak against it as I do and

NARRATOR

His fellow Hoosier writers say Kurt Vonnegut was often misunderstood, especially by some in his hometown. Jim Thom remembers a conversation with the leader of Kurt's Prairie Trek adventure, Hillis Howie.

JAMES ALEXANDER THOM

He was an old man by then, but we started talking about Kurt and he said, 'Well, I'm awfully disappointed in him.' He said, 'He doesn't have the proper respect for authority.' And I thought, well, absolutely, you know. Why should we have? And if you say things that rock the boat, then you disturb people. He really just didn't get Kurt.

He thought Kurt was seriously sacrilegious about life. But Kurt was very reverent about

DAN WAKEFIELD

He was a humanist from a long line of German free thinkers but he had a special feeling for Jesus. And he wrote about Jesus more insightfully, I feel, than many theologians. The thing that he quoted most in his work, whether novels or non-fiction, was the Sermon on

MARK VONNEGUT

I think he loved sort of the sense of community. He loved Shortridge High School. He loved the ideals of democracy and public education. I think he was proud of the fact that his family had a hardware store.

It was sort of working class. I think it was pretty idyllic for him in many ways for him to grow up here. thought it was maybe too middle But I think growing up here was

NARRATOR

By the 1970s, Vonnegut's personal life became complicated with a move to New York City, divorce from Jane and eventual marriage to photographer Jill Krementz. Years later, Indianapolis became a kind of new constant, with many relatives, his childhood friends, some newer friends, too

DAVID HOPPE

I think later in life, he began to look back at Indianapolis with an increasing And I think part of that may relating more to a generation of people who didn't see him so much as a personal critic of their lifestyle, so much as an artist that they could really appreciate. And once that dawned on him, I think he began to feel like he actually had a kind of home away

NARRATOR

In 2006, then Mayor Bart Peterson amplified the One City, One Book program and declared 2007 would be the "Year of Vonnegut," with events built around his family history, career and crowned by a speech by the man himself.

BART PETERSON

This was about at Clowes Hall and so I'm for the remarks I'm going to give. I believe it was at a library branch where I was going to be speaking. And I get a call telling me what

NARRATOR

Kurt Vonnegut had fallen down the steps of his New York brownstone and suffered

BART PETERSON

And that very likely Kurt was not going to recover and that this was obviously changing everything. And I remember that moment very vividly being shocked, obviously. The implications of it were huge in the literary world, let alone

DAVE BARRAS

He wrote Slaughterhouse-Five and plenty more. Vonnegut died Wednesday, leaving

NANETTE VONNEGUT

My father said a lot of great writers have come from the Midwest. Who's to say? I think, you know, give credit to his mother and father, Midwesterners. His sister, who he loved more than anything on Earth, I think, and his brother, Bernard.

For whatever reason, they had this mix of sensibility and intelligence and humor and that is what made him, um Indianapolis and Indiana and

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