WWbS Profiles: Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut - born November, 11, 1922 -

His signature has a fucking mustache! This makes John Hancock's signature look like a little bitch.

He's One of the smartest motherfuckers to sit at a typewriter, simply based on the fact that he added aliens to World War II and shit out a god damn literary classic.

The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named after him, presumably because he was in touch with aliens that would send it hurtling towards Earth if it were named for someone less deserving.

Known by too many of us for his cameo in Back to School. *Note he is the only author to ever appear alongside Rodney Dangerfield. Bad ass x 10, seriously.

Pictured: Vonnegut teaching literature a thing or two.

He also happens to be one of the most influential writers of the last 100 years, despite the fact that his own country nearly killed his ass during WWII.

After being captured during the Battle of the Bulge," Private Vonnegut of the 106th Infantry volunteered to be the spokesperson of the POWs, just so he could tell his German captors "what he was going to do to them when the Russians came." And this was when the Wehrmacht was executing prisoners at an alarming rate even when they were not talking shit. It's amazing that Kurt and his entire division weren't gunned down on the spot.

Leading many to wonder how he fit his giant balls in to normal ball sized pants?

Vonnegut and his comrades were instead led off to POW life in the German city of Dresden. If you know anything about World War II, you just said, "Oh, shit."

Destruction colored for your enjoyment.

Dresden was about to become the worst place in the entire planet . The U.S. and Britain firebombed the everloving hell out of the city with enough explosives to be considered a war crime, killing tens of thousands of civilians in a revenge-fueled fuckstorm.

Most of the POWs in Dresden were killed. But not Vonnegut, thanks to his captors. They stuffed him and some other prisoners in a make shift detention facility: Schlachthof Funf, or Slaughterhouse Five. It was an underground meat locker that turned out to be the safest place to be during the bombing.

It looked somthing like this - except instead of Italian Stallions, it was filled with injured American soldiers.

So, after surviving the bloodiest battle in American history, captivity by the fucking Nazis, a shit-storm that reduced dresden to a crushed jelly donut and hard-labor digging mass-graves, Kurt Vonnegut returned to the U.S. to receive the Purple Heart.

And he went on to write a dark comedy about the whole episode...

The book that resulted from his Dresden expirience, Slaughterhouse-Five, remains one of the most influential works of science fiction and dark comedy ever put to paper.