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Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1976–1985

Slapstick | Jailbird | Deadeye Dick | Galápagos More

Edited by Sidney Offit

The definitive Vonnegut edition continues with four comic gems of the 1970s and 80s

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

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November 7, 2023

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

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

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

By 1976, the year that Kurt Vonnegut published his eighth novel, Slapstick, it was apparent that the author of Slaughterhouse-Five was more than a favorite of the sixties’ counterculture, more than an acidly witty public personality and a gadfly of the military-industrial complex—more, even, than one of America’s most widely read living writers. Out of the sweeping spotlight of popular success emerged the enduring Vonnegut: a satiric fabulist to rival Mark Twain, a comic storyteller whose books are as morally serious as they are imaginative and amusing.

With the four novels collected here Vonnegut was recognized as an original American classic, the architect of an oeuvre built to last, a body of work tightly joined and cleanly made, designed along lines entirely his own. This third volume in the Library of America’s definitive edition of his fiction opens with Slapstick, the memoirs of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a hundred-year-old former president of the United States and the promulgator of an ingenious national program to stamp out “American loneliness.” By giving every citizen a new middle name, President Swain, himself assigned to the computer-generated Daffodil clan, also gives them a numberless network of concerned “relatives”—a taste of the familial bliss that Swain once enjoyed with his twin sister, Eliza, his soulmate and missing half, now dead beneath an avalanche on Mars.

Jailbird (1979) is a political memoir of a less fantastic sort, chronicling the misadventures of Walter F. Starbuck, a once-idealistic government functionary who, through no wrongdoing of his own, has become embroiled in every major national scandal from Sacco and Vanzetti to Watergate. Deadeye Dick (1982) is the story of a talentless playwright’s lifelong struggle to atone for the accidental crimes of his youth, the foolishness of his father, and the sins of his country. And in Galápagos (1985), a favorite of the author’s among his books, a ghost from the future reveals how and why a million years ago—during the global ecological disaster of 1986—humankind abandoned the land for the sea and embarked upon an unlikely evolution. The volume is rounded out with an assortment of Vonnegut rarities: speeches, essays, and commentary that touch upon the themes and particulars of these novels.

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.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

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

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

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

Slapstick

Jailbird

Deadeye Dick

Galápagos

Appendix
A “Special Message” to readers of the Franklin Library’s signed first edition of Slapstick
Address to the American Psychiatric Association, Philadelphia, October 5, 1988
A “Special Message” to readers of the Franklin Library’s signed first edition of Jailbird
Four excerpts from “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of 1980s”
Lecture at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, May 23, 1982
A “Special Message” to readers of the Franklin Library’s signed first edition of Galápagos

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-304-0 878 pages

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N° 252 Library of America Series

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