Author Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

NEW YORK--Kurt Vonnegut, seminal author of some of the most important novels of his or our time, died Wednesday night in Manhattan at the age of 84.

According to Vonnegut family friend Morgan Entrekin, the death comes as the result of brain injuries sustained during a fall several weeks ago. Vonnegut leaves behind such masterworks as "Cat's Cradle", "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions", as well as eleven other novels, plus five plays and collections of numerous essays and short stories.

If to report Vonnegut's passing is to resist the urge to append "So it goes", as he summed up so many deaths in his novel "Slaughterhouse-Five", it is but one sign of the importance and lasting appeal of his work. The work of Kurt Vonnegut describes his times in alternate turns of black satire and brilliant science fiction that are by turns metaphysical, comical and experimental. Vonnegut's celebrated devices included his own cameo as the self-admonishing writer in "Breakfast of Champions", his nonlinear structure in "Slaughterhouse-Five" and recurring characters in otherwise unconnected stories, such as the memorable sci-fi author with the unforgettable name of Kilgore Trout, often Vonnegut's surrogate in his stories.

Following a stint at Cornell University, Vonnegut fought with the United States Army in World War II and, while a prisoner of war, bore witness to the Dresden firebombing that became a recurring thematic element in many of his works. Much of his work confronted the darker sides of life, dealing with death on the personal or mass level as well as oppression and inhumanity. If Dresden was not enough of a horror to deal with, his mother committed suicide when he was a young man; in 1985, Vonnegut attempted suicide himself, later writing about the experience.

Vonnegut was very concerned with man's deterministic, predestined path; indeed, his final work of fiction, "Timequake", was a semi-autobiographical tale where his Kilgore Trout character confronted a world literally devoid of free will. He addressed this theme most famously in "Slaughterhouse-Five", through Tralfalmadorian aliens who see all seconds of time before them at once, and through the protagonist's "unstuck" bouncing back and forth from era to era. But his work was always tempered with humanistic hope, affirming the dignity of the human race and the importance of the search for meaning in life. Even in his most fantastic tales were ways of looking at the real world around us.

He is survived by his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, and by seven children both biological and adopted.