Back Novels & Stories 1950–1962

Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950–1962

Player Piano | The Sirens of Titan | Mother Night | stories More

Edited by Sidney Offit

Together in one volume, Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant early novels, along with six classic science fiction stories

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day
November 7, 2023

Video Kurt Vonnegut at 100, with Robert Weide
May 4, 2022

The Moviegoer Slaughterhouse-Five: Unstuck in time, but alive and affecting on screen
June 14, 2017

Order all four LOA Vonnegut volumes in a boxed set and save $35.00!

Kurt Vonnegut’s signature qualities as a writer—what John Updike called “his free flow of invention, the surreal beauty of his imagery, and a colloquial American style justly ranked with Mark Twain’s”—are everywhere on display in this authoritative collection of his early fiction. So too are his abiding themes: the madness of war, the vanity of human striving, and the social costs of technological innovation.

Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), is the story of Dr. Paul Proteus, chief engineer at the Ilium Works, an electronics company in upstate New York. Ill at ease with himself and his changing times, Proteus must choose sides in a looming civil war that threatens the brave new world he has helped to create. A kind of postwar Metropolis, Player Piano is at once a witty satire on the culture of General Electric headquarters, where Vonnegut once worked as a publicist, and a profound meditation on the dignity and necessity of work.

Set on Earth, Mars, Mercury, and the moons of Saturn, The Sirens of Titan (1959) is a vertiginous ride down a funnel in space-time with a trio of stuffed shirts spoiling for their pratfalls: Winston Niles Rumfoord, a patrician New Englander and paragon of style; his beautiful touch-me-not wife, Beatrice; and Malachi Constant, the world’s luckiest, wealthiest man. Are they really what they imagine themselves to be, the perfected products of a benevolent universe? Or does somebody up there despise them? Only Salo, the gentleman-robot from the planet Tralfamadore, knows for sure.

In 1961 a German American named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—the Tokyo Rose of the Third Reich—is discovered in Manhattan by a team of Nazi hunters and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial. Mother Night (1962) presents Campbell’s prison-cell confessions, revealing him to be a double agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Nazi propaganda ministry in order to broadcast intelligence to the Allies. But as he awaits his date with justice, Campbell faces an even more rigorous trial in the court of his own conscience.

Rounding out the volume are six of Vonnegut’s best science fiction stories, including “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” “EPICAC,” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” and “Harrison Bergeron,” the fantasy that skewered “political correctness” before there was a name for it.

Sidney Offit, editor, has written novels, books for young readers, and memoirs including, most recently, Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen. He was senior editor of Intellectual Digest, book editor of Politics Today, and contributing editor of Baseball Magazine. He wrote the foreword to Look at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished short fiction.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950–1962 is kept in print by a gift from Matthew McLennan to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of his daughter Emilia McLennan.
News & Views

News Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day
November 7, 2023

Video Kurt Vonnegut at 100, with Robert Weide
May 4, 2022

The Moviegoer Slaughterhouse-Five: Unstuck in time, but alive and affecting on screen
June 14, 2017

Influences Dismiss Kurt Vonnegut’s “modest, winking profundity” at your own peril, says Ron Currie, Jr.
August 17, 2016

Interviews Dan Wakefield on Kurt Vonnegut: “If anything he was a counter-counter-culture hero”
January 14, 2016
Table of Contents

Player Piano

The Sirens of Titan

Mother Night

Stories
Report on the Barnhouse Effect
EPICAC
Unready to Wear
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Harrison Bergeron
2BR02B

Appendix
Science Fiction
Introduction to “Bagombo Snuff Box,” the uncollected short fiction of Kurt Vonnegut

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-150-3 834 pages

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N° 226 Library of America Series

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