Editing Kurt Vonnegut (section)

=== Struggling writer ===
[[File:Vonnegut and family large.jpg|upright=1.35|thumb|Vonnegut with his wife Jane and children (from left to right): Mark, Edith and Nanette, in 1955]]
After ''Player Piano'', Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became ''Cat's Cradle''), he struggled to complete it, and the work languished for years. In 1954, the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional sources of income. In 1957, he and a partner opened a [[Saab automobile]] dealership on Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year.<ref>{{harvnb|Shields|2011|p=142}}.</ref> He designed a World War II–themed board game called "GHQ" ([[General Headquarters (game)|General Headquarters]]), but publishers did not buy it.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Julia |first1=Carmel |title=Kurt Vonnegut the Board Game Designer |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/crosswords/kurt-vonnegut-board-game-ghq.html |access-date=13 October 2024 |newspaper=The New York Times |date=3 October 2024|url-access=subscription}}</ref>

In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in [[Newark Bay rail accident|a train accident]]. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adamses' young sons—James, [[Steve Adams (writer)|Steven]], and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively.<ref name="Farrell9">{{harvnb|Farrell|2009|p=9}}.</ref> A fourth Adams son, Peter, age 2, also stayed with the Vonneguts for about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in Georgia.<ref>{{harvnb|Shields|2011|p=164}}.</ref>

Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot.

''[[The Sirens of Titan]]'' (1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth as experienced by a bored billionaire, Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that causes him to appear on Earth only every 59 days. The billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet [[Tralfamadore]], who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home. Human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as [[the Kremlin]], are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to [[Jacques Offenbach|Offenbach]]'s opera ''[[The Tales of Hoffmann]]''.<ref>{{harvnb|Shields|2011|pp=159–161}}.</ref>

Rumfoord, who is based on [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]], physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described this way: he "put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up."<ref>{{harvnb|Allen|1991|p=39}}.</ref> [[William Rodney Allen]], in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the fictional political figures who would play major roles in ''[[God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater]]'' and ''Jailbird''.<ref>{{harvnb|Allen|1991|p=40}}.</ref>

''[[Mother Night]]'', published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W.&nbsp;Campbell&nbsp;Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who is raised in Germany from age 11 and joins the [[Nazi Party]] during the war as a double agent for the US [[Office of Strategic Services]], rising to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as [[Adolf Eichmann]]. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be".<ref>{{harvnb|Shields|2011|pp=171–173}}.</ref> Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like [[Mark Twain]]'s ''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'', to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion".<ref>{{harvnb|Morse|2003|p=19}}.</ref>

Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story "[[Harrison Bergeron]]", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers.{{sfn|Leeds|1995|p=46}} Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high-school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows that "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom".{{sfn|Hattenhauer|1998|p=387}} Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American [[Cold War]] understandings of [[communism]] and [[socialism]].{{sfn|Hattenhauer|1998|p=387}}

With ''[[Cat's Cradle]]'' (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time".<ref>{{harvnb|Allen|1991|p=53}}.</ref> The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr.&nbsp;Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the [[atomic bomb]], seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, "ice-nine", which is solid water stable at room temperature but more dense than liquid water. If a particle of ice-nine is dropped in water, all of the surrounding water becomes ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker is based on Bernard Vonnegut's boss at the GE Research Lab, [[Irving Langmuir]], and the way ice-nine is described in the novel is reminiscent of how Bernard Vonnegut explained his own invention, silver-iodide cloudseeding, to Kurt.<ref>{{harvnb|Strand|2015|pp=236–237}}</ref> Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called [[Bokononism]], whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted) give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.<ref>{{harvnb|Allen|1991|pp=54–65}}.</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Morse|2003|pp=62–63}}.</ref>

Vonnegut based the title character of ''God Bless You, Mr.&nbsp;Rosewater'' (1964) on an accountant he knew in Cape Cod who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a [[volunteer fire department]] and giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs.<ref>{{harvnb|Shields|2011|pp=182–183}}.</ref> Allen deemed ''God Bless You, Mr.&nbsp;Rosewater'' more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time.<ref>{{harvnb|Allen|1991|p=75}}.</ref>

In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999, he wrote in ''[[The New York Times]]'', "I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids..." But then, on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a teaching job at the [[Iowa Writers' Workshop]], employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/books/052499vonnegut-writing.html |title=Writers on Writing: Despite Tough Guys, Life is Not the Only School for Real Novelists |last=Vonnegut |first=Kurt |date=May 24, 1999 |website=[[The New York Times]] |access-date=January 2, 2020 |ref=none |archive-date=December 19, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191219080205/http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/books/052499vonnegut-writing.html |url-status=live }}</ref>