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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Vonnegut War Letter Published in Newsweek

My brother Mike is a pack rat. He keeps everything. He has three garages and every one of them is full of junk. If he looked hard enough, he could find his third grade underwear.

But in addition to the junk, there are treasures. He located one last December - a letter that author Kurt Vonnegut sent home in 1945, shortly after his release from a POW camp. He and my father endured the misery of captivity together, along with the Allied firebombing of Dresden. A city known as "Florence on the Elbe" was largely incinerated, but Vonnegut and my dad survived. They became lifelong friends.

In 1996, after my dad had passed away, Vonnegut sent a copy of this remarkable letter to my mom, apparently as a Christmas present. In many ways, it is his first draft of Slaughterhouse Five. I shared this letter with you last December. I even provided a link to a pdf copy.

That letter was just published in Newsweek. They must have liked it, too.

You saw it here first.
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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 2, 2008 at 7:58 AM

    Wow, that's great. I'll pass this info on to my book club. We read SH-5 in May. What a powerful book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJuly 2, 2008 at 12:42 PM

    You have a direct line to famous persons in history. That is so cool! I need to get your autograph so I can sell it on E-bay...

    Alfonso

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bernie O'HareJuly 2, 2008 at 1:01 PM

    Alfonso, I tried. It's worthless.

    ReplyDelete
  4. MAZESeptember 7, 2015 at 12:58 PM

    Hi there. You may want to update your link to the Vonnegut letter. It used to live at:

    http://lehighvalleyramblings.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-present-from-kurt-vonnegut.html

    …but now resides here:

    http://lehighvalleyramblings.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-christmas-present-from-kurt-vonnegut.html

    Cheers.

    ReplyDelete

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