And so it goes

I read my first Kurt Vonnegut novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," in a high school literature class. Fascinated, I quickly followed it on my own with "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" and was hooked on Vonnegut.
When people ask my favorite food or my favorite movie, I usually have to stop and think. But for several years, I never hesitated when asked my favorite author (he's still a favorite but he's been joined by others).

So I snapped to attention when I heard on a recent NPR interview that Charles Shields has written a biography of Vonnegut, due out on Wednesday. Regrettably, it's initially available in Kindle and hardcover versions only, otherwise I'd have signed up to receive a copy the day it came out.

I like reading some biographies, as long as the individual is interesting and the writer is good.
I have no doubt that Vonnegut was interesting, having started his adult life fighting in World War II. The NPR interview highlights Vonnegut's disenchantment, the extent of which I hadn't realized, even though I knew he'd tried to commit suicide.
Probably few can read his works and not sense he had lived through enough to develop a clear-eyed, cynical view of people. But he veiled the cynicism with humor, coming across as more upbeat than he apparently was; as the saying goes, "Scratch the surface of a cynic, and you'll find a disappointed idealist." Some substitute "romantic" for "disappointed idealist"... potayto, potahto.

I knew nothing about Shields' writing. When I looked him up on the Amazon website, he mentioned a blog he'd kept while writing the biography. He just wrote the final post a few weeks ago.
I didn't get too far into the older posts but from what I read, the blog deserves its own post here because it gives some wonderful insight into Shields' process. If it's indicative of the quality of the biography, I won't be disappointed.

I was saddened in 2007 when I heard of Vonnegut's death and didn't buy his posthumously-published "Armageddon in Retrospect" for the longest time. I finally bought it a few months ago when I saw it languishing on a sales shelf in a little independent bookstore. Vonnegut's son, Mark, wrote the introduction, and the first two grafs seemed written for writers:

"Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. He wanted to get things right but never thought that his writing was going to have much of an effect on the course of things. His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville and Twain.
He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words. Then he would pause, thoughtfully rip the barely written-on sheet of typing paper from the typewriter, crumple it up, throw it away, and start over again. It seemed like an odd way for a grown-up to spend his time, but I was just a child who didn't know much."