Kurt Vonnegut’s Daughter Defends Her Father’s Work Against the State of Utah
In January, Penguin Random House‘s Intellectual Freedom Taskforce facilitated the Vonnegut estate’s participation in a lawsuit along with the ACLU of Utah in the first major legal case defending the freedom to read since Supreme Court declined Little vs Llano in December of last year. Read more about Vonnegut vs Utah here: Vonnegut Estate, Authors, and Student Plaintiffs Take Utah to Court Over the Freedom to Read – ACLU of Utah.
Since then, Nanette Vonnegut, daughter of Kurt Vonnegut, has worked closely with PRH’s Intellectual Freedom Taskforce in the fight to protect the First Amendment, a right her parents believed in dearly. She recently spoke to Steve Inskeep for NPR’s Morning Edition and appeared on MS Now’s Velshi Banned Book Club program.
Nanette was 15 years old when SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE was first published and offers a one-of-a-kind insight into her father’s staggering talent as well as the man she knew to be so kind, funny, and invested in the healing power of art to make us all feel less alone.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”