I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God."

Vonnegut was almost as good as his word. He quit his job at GE in 1951 and moved to Cape Cod to write full time. Although he sold a steady stream of stories to a succession of magazines, the Hoosier writer did have to take other jobs to supplement his income. He worked as an English teacher in a school on Cape Cod, wrote copy for an advertising agency, and opened one of the first Saab dealerships in the United States. With his short stories, and novels like Player Piano, published in 1952, and The Sirens of Titan, released in 1959, Vonnegut was often typecast by critics as a science fiction writer. "The feeling persists," Vonnegut has said, "that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city." It was also during these years that his father and sister died. In the novels Vonnegut published leading up to Slaughterhouse Five, which also included such works as Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, themes emerged that would find their full flowering with Slaughterhouse Five. There is, according to Vonnegut, an "almost intolerable sentimentality beneath everything" he writes--a sentimentality he might have learned from a black cook employed by the Vonnegut family named Ida Young. Young often read to the young Kurt from a anthology of idealistic poetry about "love which would not die, about faithful dogs and humble cottages where happiness was, about people growing old, about visits to cemeteries, about babies who die." The essence of Vonnegut's work might be best expressed by one of his characters, crazed millionaire Elliot Rosewater, who proclaims: "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." After all, Vonnegut has reminded us time after time, "pity is like rust to a cruel social machine."

After briefly touching on his World War II experience in other works -- Rosewater, for example, hallucinates that Indianapolis becomes engulfed in a firestorm -- Vonnegut finally, in 1969, delivered to the reading public a book dealing with the Dresden bombing. Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, like Vonnegut, a young infantry scout captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and taken to Dresden where he and his other prisoners survive the Feb. 13, 1945 firebombing of the city. Pilgrim copes with his war trauma through time travels to the planet Tralfamadore, whose inhabitants have the ability to see all of time -- past, present, and future -- simultaneously.