God Bless You Mr Rosewater

“[Vonnegut] at his wildest best.”—The New York Times Book Review Eliot Rosewater—drunk, volunteer fireman, and President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation—is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature . . . with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is Kurt Vonnegut’s funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to. “A brilliantly funny satire on almost everything.”—Conrad Aiken “[Vonnegut was] our finest black humorist. . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—The Atlantic Monthly

Eliot Rosewater, drunk, volunteer fireman, and President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature ... with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is [this] portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to. -Back cover.

With the satirical eye of his science fiction author alter ego Kilgore Trout, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five delivers a classic of modern American literature. Eliot Rosewater, President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation and volunteer firefighter, is tortured by an inheritance he doesn’t feel that he deserves. After (unfortunately) developing a social conscience, he sets out on a drunken tour of America, unravelling a little more at every stop until his path crosses with the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s funniest satires, about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.

The author of Slaughterhouse Five and Jailbird jumps back and forth from the afterlife to interview Sir Isaac Newton, Clarence Darrow, William Shakespeare, and his own character, Kilgore Trout, in this humorous look at death.

Kurt Vonnegut and humanism go hand in hand. In Behaving Decently: Kurt Vonnegut’s Humanism, Wayne Laufert examines how Vonnegut revealed his moral philosophy through the themes and characters in his work and through his public comments. Topic by topic, Vonnegut’s written and spoken views are explored, from his first novel, Player Piano (1952), through his antiwar masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), to the collections of his fiction and nonfiction that appear up till today, long after his death in 2007. His speeches, essays, interviews, and journalism, which support and expand upon the sentiments in his novels, receive proper consideration in this conversational overview of Vonnegut’s life and career. Religion, war, politics, science, art—these subjects and more are seen through Vonnegut’s perspective and are placed within a larger humanistic outlook. His most famous creation, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, gets his own chapter too. Vonnegut called himself a “Christ-worshiping agnostic,” a term that Behaving Decently analyzes in the context of his upbringing as a freethinker, his wartime experience, his time in the corporate world, and other factors that formed his values. Those values are perhaps best expressed by his character Eliot Rosewater, the damaged, super-rich philanthropist: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” Vonnegut’s real and imagined selves were incorporated into Kurt Vonnegut the author, the public speaker, the interview subject, and even the character that appears in some of his books. After all, he wrote, “I myself am a work of fiction.” That funny, wise, sometimes depressed persona was humanistic. Behaving Decently shows the reader how Kurt Vonnegut reminded us to take small steps along hopeful paths to kindness and community and dignity and art—and farting around.

Offers an examination of the works of the American science fiction writer.

Kurt Vonnegut's death in 2007 marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture—a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of the fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged—and which it in turn helped shape. Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study charts the impact of Vonnegut on American society and of that society on Vonnegut for more than a half-century to illustrate how each informed the other. Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Kurt Vonnegut's America shows us that Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test—opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most popular and admired authors of post-war American literaturefamous both for his playful and deceptively simple style as well as for his scathing critiques of social injustice and war. Criti.

Eliot Rosewater--drunk, volunteer fireman, and President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation--is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature . . . with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

Despite an often unfair reputation as being less popular, less successful, or less refined than their bona-fide Broadway counterparts, Off Broadway musicals deserve their share of critical acclaim and study. A number of shows originally staged Off Broadway have gone on to their own successful Broadway runs, from the ever-popular A Chorus Line and Rent to more off-beat productions like Avenue Q and Little Shop of Horrors. And while it remains to be seen if other popular Off Broadway shows like Stomp, Blue Man Group, and Altar Boyz will make it to the larger Broadway theaters, their Off Broadway runs have been enormously successful in their own right. This book discusses more than 1,800 Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, showcase, and workshop musical productions. It includes detailed descriptions of Off Broadway musicals that closed in previews or in rehearsal, selected musicals that opened in Brooklyn and in New Jersey, and American operas that opened in New York, along with general overviews of Off Broadway institutions such as the Light Opera of Manhattan. The typical entry includes the name of the host theater or theaters; the opening date and number of performances; the production's cast and creative team; a list of songs; a brief plot synopsis; and general comments and reviews from the New York critics. Besides the individual entries, the book also includes a preface, a bibliography, and 21 appendices including a discography, filmography, a list of published scripts, and lists of musicals categorized by topic and composer.

Rarely have two writers spoken so candidly about the intersection where the lives they live meet the art they practice. That these two writers happen to be Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer make this an historic and joyous occasion. A little book filled with human, profound and beautiful musings on life.

Includes more than 360 interpretative essays on works of twentieth-century fiction published in the United States and Latin America.

"Vonnegut blended the bizarrely hypothetical with the gut-wrenchingly actual, infusing his biting wit with a bleak worldview partially created during his service in WWII and his time as a prisoner of war. Exploring each of Vonnegut's works, the author dis

Compiles transcripts of 33 U.S. court cases, up to 1980, which pertain to library censorship and the right to read.