Tempus Fugit

The post World War II generation spawned a new crop of literature, writing with a gritty realism and a certain degree of cynicism. Saul Bellow typified the style of the time, immortalizing the down and out with a strong air of hopeless depression.

Another one of the Twentieth Century literary lions has gone, leaving behind a body of work that defined his time. Kurt Vonnegut was an icon, the face of the counterculture era that thrived during the Viet Nam War days. He honed his craft at the Chicago City News Bureau, famous as the employer that asked its reporters to check it out if their mother said she loved them. Edna Ferber was once such a reporter, but there's no more of them being made.

He was a science fiction author at first, but over time his genre became one of his own making. Aliens and space travel appeared in his books, but there was nothing science fiction-y about the plots or the topics. After witnessing, and surviving, the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut developed an outlook on the world that could best be expressed by writing in his own way. Could he have exorcised his demons while chained to the rules of a particular genre? Rather, he combined a little out of this world, a touch of satire and a dose of humor to become one of the most beloved authors of our time.

Would he have gotten published in this day and age, when the market for fiction is said to be so tight that anyone trying to break into the industry shouldn't even try? In Rodney Dangerfield's silly comedy, Back To School, the comedian played a wealthy father who decided to attend university in response to his son's challenge. To help the lad along, the father hired Kurt Vonnegut to pen an essay for the boy's English class, thinking to garner an A. Needless to say, the English teacher did not find the paper to be of A caliber.

A witness to the war, a soldier returned home from a POW camp, Vonnegut battled depression for most of his life. Surely his suffering, his mental anguish, was deposited within the pages of his manuscripts. Post-traumatic stress syndrome was not invented recently. Will our own generation of soldiers find solace in the written word? Is there another Kurt Vonnegut out there, patrolling in Anbar province, piecing together sentences and paragraphs in his head?