​Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.) was born in Indianapolis, IN on Armistice Day (the day when WWI ended). Some may call that coincidental, others a sign, and still others may view it as ironic.  His parents were well-to-do and his father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr. was a successful architect. Then along came the Great Depression. Kurt's father saw his mental health, financial wealth, and job opportunities plummet. The family was hit hard by the Depression and like many family's had to scrape by on limited amounts of money. As a teenager, Kurt Vonnegut wrote for his high school's (Shortridge High School) newspaper the Daily Echo. Once he graduated, he attended Cornell University in New York. He continued to write, this time for the Cornell Sun, he was majoring in biochemistry. His father had urged his son to major in the "hard" sciences to prevent his son from the same financial failure he experienced. Biochemistry proved too difficult, so Vonnegut dropped out and joined the U.S. Army in 1942. The Army sent him to the University of Tennessee to complete a mechanical engineering degree. Once done, Kurt Vonnegut was shipped off to the European Theatre in WWII, working as an infantry battalion scout. During the Battle of the Bulge, (Dec. 14, 1944) Kurt was captured by German soldiers and taken to a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Dresden, Germany where Kurt and the other POWs were contained in the basement of a meat slaughterhouse (Much of his war experience inspired Slaughterhouse Five). Luckily this prison served as the POWs savior when Allied forces firebombed Dresden mercilessly for two days. The remaining German survivors forced the POWs to exhume dead bodies from the rubble while spitting and harassing them for the damage the Allies did. Shortly after the bombing, though, Soviet forces rolled in and freed the POWs. Kurt Vonnegut returned home to the United States in May 1945, receiving a Purple Heart for his endeavors. Although in later years he protested U.S. military involvement, he looked back on his time in the Army as "the right thing to do." Upon his return, Vonnegut married his high school girlfriend Jane Marie Cox. Then, he tried to pursue an M.A. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. The keyword is tried here. His thesis titled "Fluctuations Between Good & Evil in Simple Tales" was promptly rejected. At the urging of his brother, who was a scientist for General Electric, Kurt moved to Schenectady, New York in 1947. He worked as a public relations writer for G.E., which inspired a lot of his short fiction. He went back and forth between enjoying his job and despising its dishonesty. Due to his short story successes, he was able to quit his job at G.E. and move his family to Cape Cod in 1950, where he could focus more on writing. In 1951, he published his first novel, Player Piano. Themes centered on the distrust of technology enshrouded the novel and could still be seen in the future when Kurt Vonnegut complained that the Internet was "a particularly habit-forming, hallucinatory, pernicious form of LSD" as he typed on a computer. Player Piano was met with good reception and spurred Kurt to continue to write. However, it wasn't the earth-shattering financial success he needed. Instead, Kurt alternated his time between writing and work odd-end jobs such as ad man, English teacher, and car dealership entrepreneur. Tragedy struck several blows to Kurt in the late 1950s. In 1957, his father died. In 1958, his brother-in-law died in a train crash and then his sister Alice died of cancer. The result was Alice and her husband's four children being orphaned. Kurt and Jane took in the eldest three, adopting them, while the fourth child was sent to live with another family.  Kurt's career on the other hand was skyrocketing. He produced novel after novel, most notably being Slaughterhouse-Five which was his first bestseller and a potent poison to the romanticized views of war depicted by Hollywood.  In 1970, Kurt separated and divorced his wife. The reasons have been closely kept, but it's believed that part of it stemmed from Jane's desire for a big and involved family, which conflicted with Kurt's desire for a more solitary life. He ended up marrying photographer Jill Krementz and adopting her daughter Lilly. That same year, he began teaching creative writing at Harvard. Caught by surprise in 1971, the University of Chicago granted Kurt Vonnegut his M.A. in anthropology, using The Cat's Cradle as his thesis. Kurt joked that a semi-sarcastic novel somehow trumped his academic papers in anthropological significance.  1972 also brought tragedy as Kurt's son Mark experienced a schziophrenic breakdown. Mark, like his father, turned the mental instability into literary inspiration, writing about it in a memoir and taking the initiative to become a pediatric doctor. During this time, Kurt's career hit it's peak with Breakfast of Champions. His subsequent novels were good, but their critical acclaim lacked and Kurt resorted to retiring from fiction, focusing instead on art (several of his pieces are featured in art museums) and essayist nonfiction.  Mental health issues weren't just limited to Kurt Vonnegut's father and son. His depression (and potential PTSD) hit a breaking point when Kurt tried to commit suicide in 1984. Key word here is tried. The alcohol and pills didn't do their job and Kurt Vonnegut was soon rehabilitated. In 2000, his apartment caught on fire when an ash-tray tipped over. Kurt was hospitalized again, this time for smoke inhalation, where he joked that cigarettes which were supposed to be the most proactive death agents available, weren't doing their job right.  In his latter years, his novel writing slacked off and was replaced by political essays. He passed away on April 11, 2007 from head injuries sustained by a fall. Although Kurt Vonnegut's opinions were often unsolicited and unusually blunt, his unique writing style and quick wit set him apart from other writers and cemented him in literary history compared to the likes of Mark Twain.