Acknowledgments

It takes a village.

First, I would like to thank Dan Wakefield for offering me the opportunity to compose this book and for his support whenever I’ve asked. I’m thankful to the late Don Farber, formerly head of the Vonnegut Trust, and Arthur Klebanoff of RosettaBooks for entrusting me by contract to do it, and Julia Whitehead of the Vonnegut Memorial Library for introducing me to Dan Simon, editorial director and publisher of Seven Stories Press.

I am grateful to both my publishers. I so appreciate the courtesy and ready communication of Arthur Klebanoff throughout the process and his immediate enthusiasm upon reading the completed manuscript. I am hugely thankful for Dan Simon’s kind but firm editorial and publishing guidance, our lively exchanges, and his simpatico sensibility. I am grateful for the patience of both while I toiled far past the original deadline to realize an expanded vision of this book.

My thanks to the entire team at Seven Stories Press, particularly Lauren Hooker for her editorial and copyediting expertise, Victoria Nebolsin for contributing to those efforts, Ruth Weiner for informing me about and implementing the publicity process, Anastasia Damaskou for her assistance in that, and Stewart Cauley for his splendid design talent.

Next, my inexpressible gratitude to the members of my peer fiction writing group—Naomi Chase, Edith Konecky, Joan Leibowitz, Carole Rosenthal, NancyKay Shapiro, Diane Simmons, and Meredith Sue Willis—for their reliable community, unstinting enthusiasm, and frank feedback. Thank you for keeping me on target and buoyant as audience to my drafts during the four-year haul.

Special thanks to Carole Rosenthal, who insisted I drop everything else I was engaged in when Kurt Vonnegut died, in order to write about him while I was in mourning and overflowing with feeling. Thanks to Professor Gary Schmidgall for posting the resulting memoir on his Hunter Faculty website, Donald Breckenridge at the Brooklyn Rail for publishing it a few years later, and Zachary Petit for printing an excerpt in Writer’s Digest: all turned out to be stepping-stones to this book.

Thanks to Mark Vonnegut, Edith Squibb Vonnegut, and Nanette Vonnegut, each of whom have generously allowed me reprint and reproduction permissions and have lent me their trust in this project. Thanks to Edie and Nanny for showing me their paintings, many of family members. I am forever indebted to Edie for including me in her father’s memorial service, and for many summers of friendship, to Mark for graciously giving me a tour of his house that included personal treasures of and from his father and for his terrific book, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, which I called upon in this one, and to Nanny for her responsive communication and for preserving her father’s artwork in Kurt Vonnegut Drawings and her memories of him in its foreword, from which I borrowed.

I am in debt to several librarians, notably Isabel Planton at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, for assisting me on my time-pressed visit to Vonnegut’s archive, overseeing reproductions of his manuscripts, and for alerting me to the Granfalloon conference celebrating Vonnegut’s work at Indiana University and introducing me to Ed Comantale, its director. Thanks to others at the Lilly who helped: Zachary Downey, Emily Grover, Jody Mitchell, Joe McManis, and especially Sarah McElroy Mitchell, whose determined search uncovered a much-needed original in the archive. Thanks to Squirrel C. Walsh at the Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University; to Franziska Schmor at the Stiftbibliothek in St. Gallen; Eisha Neeley at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; and Mike Perkins at the Indianapolis Public Library.

Thanks to experts on Vonnegut whose books and brains I’ve drawn upon, including Jerome Klinkowitz in conversation; Dan Wakefield’s compilation of Vonnegut’s letters and speeches in Letters and If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?; Gregory Sumner’s Unstuck in Time; Charles Shields’s biography, And So It Goes, and his generosity in sharing quotes of Vonnegut’s about writing and teaching that he hadn’t used; and especially to Rodney Allen for his anthology Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, which I replied upon heavily.

Thanks to fellow students of Vonnegut’s whose invaluable recollections of him as a teacher enlarge my own portrayal, and often gave me a nostalgic laugh: Dick Cummins, John Casey, Dan Gleason, Gail Godwin, Barry Jay Kaplan, John Irving, Robert Lehrman, David Milch, Ronni Sandroff, and Jim Siegelman.

Thanks to Kurt’s best friend Sidney Offit for a delightful afternoon, the gift of his book, and his marvelous tales about Kurt.

So many friends bestowed support in so many ways. Rhoda Waller counseled emphatically that the writing of this book was my unique political/humanitarian contribution, and not to bemoan greater activism post-Trump while buried in the writing of it, and sent me Gail Mazur’s poem as comfort. Longtime friends Deborah McKay, Nicki Edson, and Skip Renker read early chapters and spurred me on. I am indebted to Leon Friedman for his singular contribution and generosity in providing legal expertise, and to his wife, Gail Marks, for conveying messages and encouragement. Marshall Smith offered his memoir of Kurt, and Charlie Rosarius provided translations from the German. Special thanks to Barry Jay Kaplan, whose phone number Kurt urged on me when I first arrived in the Big Apple in 1974, a close comrade in the writing trade ever since and the first reader of the complete manuscript, who sent comments and a magnanimous thumbs-up.

Thanks to acquaintances and friends who came my way with tips, information, insight, and support: Bob Atwan, Matt Bardin, Rhonda Coulet, Arthur Diamond, Richard DiLallo, Susan DiLallo, Anita Feldman, Joy Fraser, Janis Graham, Nancy Green, John Hinant, David Hoppe, Axel Jablonsky, Sarah Jackson, Jeffery Laudenslager, John Laudenslager, John Luster, Ed McCann, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Risa Mickenberg, Adam Murray, Scott Oglesby, Mo Ogrodnik, Carl Orstendorf, Richard Perry, Harriet Reisen, Debra Goldsmith Robb, Terrence Ross, Carolyn Steinhoff, Ann Stoney, Janet Sullivan, Marion St. Onge, Andrea Stappert, Patrick Strezlick, David Ulin, Steven Watson, Mimi Wheeler, Stephen White, Dorothea Zwirner, and Rudolf Zwirner.

I’m grateful to Julia Cameron for writing The Artist’s Way, which I read long before writing this book, and which I believe helped lead me to it.

To my enormous sorrow, three people with whom I spent some remarkable hours talking about Vonnegut as I worked on this book have passed away and will not see their contributions: Ivan Chermayeff, Louise DeSalvo, and Frank Preuss.

My gratitude to Sam Strezlick and Christine Rousu for revealing their tattoos of Vonnegut’s words and sharing the stories behind them, and also to Thais Miller, Joseph Shipley, Scott Sears, Joshua Weber, and the young employees at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, plus my dear grandson Conrad Wurzburg, all of whom jolted me into comprehending how much Vonnegut’s work is cherished down the generations.

Thanks to loved ones for my three Vonnegut mugs, some notecards, and a “St. Vonnegut” candle, reminding me daily of the swag surrounding his legacy.

Special thanks to Charity Coleman, who assisted me early on in the daunting task of sorting the passages I’d marked in Vonnegut paperbacks into their digital equivalents and arranging them into the framework that would eventually become the chapters of this book; to Peter Tighe for his masterful massaging of pinched muscles and tissue from all my cutting, pasting, and indenting; to Joe Spallone for his superb physical therapy, which enabled me to go on; and to Cindy Hinant, my husband’s studio manager, who, along with him, has been a sounding board throughout the writing of this book, and who came to my rescue in finalizing the endnotes, bibliography, and illustrations, with her eagle eye for precision and her incredible patience.

Thanks to my sister Judianne White, my loyal champion, for her ready support, only a dial away. Thanks to my longtime painter friend Karen Gunderson, my writing cheerleader supreme from the time we met at the University of Iowa, then pioneered Tribeca as roommates, to the present. Thanks to my stepdaughter, Nanette Kuehn, and son-in-law, Robert Wurzburg, for their constancy and affirmation, and to all the rest of my family—McConnells, Kuehns, Kanevskis, Schumakers, Chastains, Lauritsens, Frasers, Magics, and Cypherts—who have my back, especially my niece Angela, who shared special Vonnegut writing moments with me some years ago.

I am ever grateful to my husband, Gary Kuehn, consummate artist, for sumptuous meals, steadfast financial and artistic support, and for being my soul mate and teammate. I couldn’t have done this without you.

And thanks most of all to Kurt Vonnegut, up in Heaven now, whose presence I’ve felt from the beginning of this project, for illuminating me.