And so he goes.

Kurt Vonnegut may have had an unfortunate end, dying at age 84 due to an injury a brief time ago, but he certainly lived a full and successful literary life, influencing a couple generations and I'll bet, with the renewed interest in his prime novel period due to his death, one to come. For young'un's I'd recommend Cat's Cradle followed by Slaughterhouse-Five and for those going deeper, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night. After that there's still loads of good material, including the hard-to-find PBS production version of Between Time & Timbuktu and the great short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. I'm unfamiliar with his more recent world, but seem to recall Galapagos pleasing a friend or two.

He also chain smoked, so that guy cheated death for quite some time.

When I first moved to NYC after college I had a few occasions to see Vonnegut on the streets of the city, always in his trademark trenchcoat, unmistakable curly mop and Germanic moustache, acting pretty regular but me way too impressed to say hello. I recall him hailing a cab one time, the other just walking quickly, determinedly, towards and past me on the sidewalk, his head bent slightly down, in much deeper thought that I could muster.

In my formative years I read about getting unstuck in time, so it goes, boka maru and the most frightening weapon of all time, Ice-Nine. I grew up in New York State's Tri-City area where he wrote his first novel, Player Piano, and when we read it in high school it was like reading about the factory next door. (There's an excellent obit here -- props to GTS for sending the link.) The sense you got from Vonnegut was, I think, an extremely kind pessimist, forgiving in his larger view all while prophesying our global self-destruction.

From some of his political writing and speaking you got the sense he was never going to completely give up, but if his fiction seems cynical, it's moral by example rather than goading. He asked more questions than he answered, and thanks in part to his early training as a newspaper reporter (crime beat), he wrote in what the Brits sometimes call "The Common English". This means lit without linguistic pretension -- great ideas and, usually, great stories that anybody can read without a degree.

Here's to Kurt, his alter-ego Kilgore Trout, Paul Proteus, Billy Pilgrim, Dwayne Hoover and the rest.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.