Kurt Vonnegut died last night. This it sad. Until yesterday, he was one of the few living writers who had the legendary status of writers like Kafka or Fitzgerald in my mind. His work is the best bridge I know to get teenage boys who read nothing but science fiction to read literature. His books are funny, vivid, weird, imaginative, and deal with some of the biggest questions of our age–God and science, war, the destruction of the planet, etc.

Not too long ago, I read The Sirens of Titan and was impressed with the quality of Vonnegut’s imagination. Written in 1959, it has such vivid descriptions of Mars and Saturn and Titan that it made me wonder if we haven’t lost something with all our current technological understanding of the solar system.

I haven’t read all of Vonnegut’s books, but as luck would have it, I recently got a lot of them. I was going to read something post-20th century for once next, but I think I’m going to put that aside for a bit and read his work instead.

ETA: I was going to put up a recent Bookworm interview I heard with Vonnegut, but I got distracted by this YouTube video where he talks about getting started as a writer:

I had a family and I wasn’t making nearly enough money to support the family. So I started writing short stories on weekend. And there was an enormous magazine industry at that time which paid very high prices for stories and they needed lots of them. Saturday Evening Post published five a week, Collier’s published five a week, Liberty Post published five a week and they paid tons of money for them. And I began that way and I wrote one and the Saturday Evening Post bought it and paid me one-eighth what I was making at General Electric a year. And so I wrote another one and they paid me more. In a period of a few months, I had made more money than General Electric was prepared to pay me all year. I had money piled up.

Ok, now I really am depressed.