The Hand of Time

In May 1944, his mother committed suicide.

In December 1944, he was captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge.

In February 1945, he survived the Dresden bombing by huddling with other POWs in an underground meat locker as the city burned.

After the war, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for the City News Bureau, a legendary boot camp for reporters. Needing more money -- he'd gotten married and had a kid -- he wound up doing publicity for General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y.

He loved GE. "The machinists were so good," he recalls, "and the engineers really knew what they were doing." He loved the fact that the company president -- "250,000 employees, plants all over the country" -- had come up through the GE apprentice program. "It was a family," he says.

But he'd started writing short stories for magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. They paid well for fiction in those long-gone days, "so I quit and moved to Cape Cod. And that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life, write short stories for the magazines."

No such luck.

It wasn't long before TV began to undercut the fiction-oriented magazines. So Vonnegut turned from stories to novels. Between 1952 and 1965 he published "Player Piano," "The Sirens of Titan," "Mother Night," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater." He sold a couple as paperback originals because you got paid faster that way.

He opened a Saab dealership to supplement his writing income.

"Cat's Cradle" in particular -- Vonnegut's favorite among his books -- did fairly well, and he began to gather a cult following. But the literary establishment paid him no mind. By the mid-'60s, he says, "I was almost entirely out of print." Then "a guy named Seymour Lawrence took notice of me."

Lawrence, an independent publisher who worked with Delacorte Press, put those early novels back in bookstores. He also gave Vonnegut a contract for the book that would make him famous -- and restore the cataclysm of Dresden to its rightful place on history's atrocity charts.

'So It Goes'

On the night of Feb. 13-14, 1945, as Vonnegut crouched in that meat locker below a Dresden slaughterhouse, wave after wave of British bombers dropped 650,000 incendiary bombs and nearly 1,500 tons of high explosives on the city, deliberately creating a firestorm so intense that its heat alone made cars burst into flames. No one knows how many died, but estimates range from 35,000 to well over 100,000. The city burned for a week.