Kurt Vonnegut

A grandson of German immigrants from Indianapolis, Vonnegut was studying biochemistry at Cornell when he enlisted; captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he was a POW laboring in Dresden when British and American bombers firebombed the city in February 1945, killing tens of thousands. He and other prisoners survived only because they were sheltered in an underground meat locker: slaughterhouse number five.

He spent the postwar years writing public-relations copy for General Electric and selling science-fiction stories to magazines to support a growing family, publishing novel after modestly received novel before Slaughterhouse-Five finally made him famous at forty-six. He struggled with depression for decades and attempted suicide by overdose in 1984.

He died in 2007 at eighty-four from injuries sustained in a fall at his Manhattan home.