Book description
Eliot Rosewater is tortured by a fabulous inheritance he feels he does
not deserve, so he devotes himself to drink, and to a life serving the
dull, the ugly, the irrelevant and the useless. This is a novel about
the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money. It is the
story of a millionaire's lunacy, the obsessions of a famous family and
the collective madness of a nation. Kurt Vonnegut was born in
Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University.
During WWII, as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the
destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired
Slaughterhouse Five
. Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination
first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan
in 1959 and according to Harper's
Magazine, established him as 'a true artist' with Cat's Cradle
in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, 'one of the best living
American writers'. Vonnegut died in April 2007.
