Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praise
PREFACE
WHERE I LIVE
HARRISON BERGERON
WHO AM I THIS TIME?
WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
LONG WALK TO FOREVER
THE FOSTER PORTFOLIO
MISS TEMPTATION
ALL THE KING’S HORSES
TOM EDISON’S SHAGGY DOG
NEW DICTIONARY
NEXT DOOR
MORE STATELY MANSIONS
THE HYANNIS PORT STORY
D.P.
REPORT ON THE BARNHOUSE EFFECT
THE EUPHIO QUESTION
GO BACK TO YOUR PRECIOUS WIFE AND SON
DEER IN THE WORKS
THE LIE
UNREADY TO WEAR
THE KID NOBODY COULD HANDLE
THE MANNED MISSILES
EPICAC
ADAM
TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW
DELL BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT
Copyright Page
For
Knox Burger
Ten days older than I am. He has been a very good father to me.
"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."
—THOREAU
AMERICA’S GREATEST SATIRIST
KURT VONNEGUT IS...
"UNIQUE... one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best."
—DORIS LESSING
The New York Times Book Review
"OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST. ... We laugh in self-defense."
—The Atlantic Monthly
"AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST."
—Harper’s Magazine
"A MEDICINE MAN, CONJURING UP FANTASIES TO WARN THE WORLD."
—The Charlotte Observer
"A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION."
—Chicago Sun-Times
"A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM."
—The New York Times
PREFACE
HERE IT is, a retrospective exhibition of the shorter works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—and Vonnegut is still very much with us, and I am still very much Vonnegut. Somewhere in Germany is a stream called the Vonne. That is the source of my curious name.
I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.
In the water I am beautiful.
My father and paternal grandfather were architects in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I was born. My maternal grandfather owned a brewery there. He won a Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition with his beer, which was Lieber Lager. The secret ingredient was coffee.
My only brother, eight years older than I, is a successful scientist. His special field is physics as it relates to clouds. His name is Bernard, and he is funnier than I am. I remember a letter he wrote after his first child, Peter, was born and brought home. "Here I am," that letter began, "cleaning shit off of practically everything."
My only sister, five years older than I, died when she was forty. She was over six feet tall, too, by an angstrom unit or so. She was heavenly to look at, and graceful, both in and out of water. She was a sculptress. She was christened "Alice," but she used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody agreed. Sometime in a dream maybe I will find out what her real name was.
Her dying words were, "No pain." Those are good dying words. It was cancer that killed her.
And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: "Here I am cleaning shit off of practically everything" and "No pain." The contents of this book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.
I used to be a public relations man for General Electric, and then I became a free-lance writer of so-called "slick fiction," a lot of it science fiction. Whether I improved myself morally by making that change I am not prepared to say. That is one of the questions I mean to ask God on Judgment Day— along with the one about what my sister’s name really was.
That could easily be next Wednesday.
I have already put the question to a college professor, who, climbing down into his Mercedes-Benz 300SL gran turismo, assured me that public relations men and slick writers were equally vile, in that they both buggered truth for money.
I asked him what the very lowest grade of fiction was, and he told me, "Science fiction." I asked where he was bound in such a rush,