Oh the 1960s, what a mind altering decade. Although we weren’t there to experience and participate in the pursuant activist and political groups growing at the time, we know that the 60s inspired a young and intelligent counterculture of people acting, thinking, and living alternately of the mainstream. Peace, war, love and the chain-smoking, pessimist, Kurt Vonnegut were at the center of the 60s momentous upheavals.
Worn out copies of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle could be found in the hands of longhaired college students and weed-smoking street musicians throughout the country, daring them to challenge the everyday methodologies of political and social institutions and reality itself. It made them examine consumerism and philosophy, all the while satirizing the generality of human existence at all.
Vonnegut wrote 14 pieces of twisted and scathingly accurate fiction. Each novel filled with his own creations of alternate universes, such as Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five, an influential classic that was published in 1969 to set the stage of the national unrest and social disorder during the Vietnam War.
Vonnegut wrote these ageless literary pieces to remind the hungry youth that truth lies deeper than the surface. His in-depth examinations of life didn’t cease when his novels did, in fact Vonnegut even questioned his own novels – rendering a grading system of his own published works, supposedly leaving him grounded. A brilliant mind and true philosopher.
– Taylor Wojick, Contributing Writer