Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day. The featured article for Thursday, 11 April 2024 is Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut ( VON-ə-gət; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U. S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau. Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. It received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, including two—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—that were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968. Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Its anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. It rose to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous. Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). Since his death, he has been hailed for his dark humor commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction. This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:55 UTC on Thursday, 11 April 2024. For the full current version of the article, see Kurt Vonnegut on Wikipedia . This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes. Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai . Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner , a current events podcast. Until next time, I'm Stephen Neural.