Dan Wakefield on Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer: Young Adult Fiction

This first and only YA biography of the great American novelist and humanist comes out on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, and many other brilliant novels and short stories, is one of our greatest American writers. Born in 1922, Vonnegut’s life was full of great fortune and great despair: his family was wealthy, but lost everything in the market crash of 1929; he was the youngest son in a loving family, until his mother fell into a depression and committed suicide; he joined the army in WWII with great pride for our country, but experienced instead a world of destruction and horror. How did he channel the highs and lows of his life into great writing? Dan Wakefield, a friend and mentee of Vonnegut’s for decades, distills the facts – including Vonnegut’s novels, essays, interviews, letters, and personal experiences – into a beautiful telling of the making of a writer. It is as though Wakefield is a friend walking through Vonnegut’s life alongside him, a guide for readers to his extraordinary life. Here is a burgeoning artist’s life to inspire anyone who has read Vonnegut’s work or who themselves aspire to write. Moderated by Ellen Book, branch manager with the Miami-Dade Public Library System.

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