State University of New York at Fredonia

• Kurt Vonnegut didn’t deliver the famous “Wear Sunscreen” graduation speech published in the Chicago Tribune that was often mistakenly attributed to the celebrated author.
• I don’t even remember who gave my class’s graduation speech, much less a single word the speaker said.
• During the early and mid-1960s, he commanded an avid and devoted following on campuses before he had produced any bestsellers.
• Why was a middle-aged writer born in 1922 adored by a counterculture told not to trust anyone over 30?

Their parents’ generation

• A cultural touchstone, the novel changed the way Americans think and write about war.
• Like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” with its jokes, drawings, risqué limericks and flying saucers, blurs the line between high and low culture.
• Cited as one of the top novels of the 20th century, “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been transformed into film, theatrical plays, a graphic novel and visual art.
• He continued to believe all his life in the civic virtues he learned as a student at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis.

Fool or philosopher?

• Vonnegut had the look – sad, kind eyes under that mop of uncontrollable hair, the full droopy mustache.
• Looking like a cross between Albert Einstein and a carnival huckster, Vonnegut had his contradictions on full display.
• A fool or a philosopher?

A forceful defense of art

• He used his own experience in World War II to destroy any notion of a good war.
• “For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own,” he lamented, referencing the Nazi concentration camp.
• The military-industrial complex, he told the graduates at Bennington, treats people and their children and their cities like garbage.
• Instead, Americans should spend money on hospitals and housing and schools and Ferris wheels rather than on war machinery.