A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This link will take you to a copy of a letter by a young Kurt Vonnegut, addressed to his family (presumably his father; his mother took her own life on Mother's Day, 1944). It encapsulates his experience during the final year of fighting in Europe during the Second World War. The suffering he both endured and witnessed infuse the missive with a gut-wrenching pathos and open-eyed sincerity. Its tone is one of shocked disbelief and the writing features many of his most estimable authorial talents, gifts that would become trademarks of his storied and prolific career: an almost elegiac sense of irony, a twinge of survivor's guilt, a glib and sardonic sense of humor and wry yet compassionate observations on human nature and suffering.

It's eerily inspiring to read something like this. Private Vonnegut, your guide, takes you to the brink of apocalypse and back, a grim survivor's tale. It's also a tale of history within history: we witness a formative experience of one of the most human and wisest satirists in the North American canon, the basis for his best known work.

He would later write: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too." It's with quotes like this one, we see that apart from his prodigious imagination, the man possessed a really big heart, too. He is missed.