Vonnegut has left the building

What better way to birth my blog than with a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut (d. Apr 11, 07) one of the most interesting, eccentric, thought-provoking writers? I found Vonnegut four years ago, attracted by the title of his essays, "A Man Without a Country." As much as I felt like a woman without a country at the time, I had to put it down after a few pages. It was not what I had expected. Written in a free-flowing manner, it was as if the thoughts had flown from the author's mind to his pen skipping social filters. It was a little bit bitter, a little bit funny, absurd and profound at the same time. Most of all, it was liberating.

Here's an autobiographical excerpt from one of his most famous novels Slaughterhouse Five:

"I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, "You know -- you never wrote a story with a villain in it."
''I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war. "