Who was Kurt Vonnegut Jr?

Kurt Vonnegut was a twentieth century American writer, playwright, and artist most known for his novels critiquing war, religion, government, and group think within society. His most notable works include Slaughterhouse-5, Cat’s Cradle, and Mother Night. Vonnegut was also the president of the American Humanist Association from . Humanism is a philosophy that focus on the deriving morals and values from human origins as opposed to the divine. Or as Vonnegut himself put it, “‘I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behaved decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead” (Friedman).
Vonnegut was born during the early part of the twentieth century to working-class parents in Indianapolis, Indiana. Vonnegut suffered great losses during his childhood, “Vonnegut's father fell into severe depression and his mother died after overdosing on sleeping pills the night before Mother's Day. This attainment and loss of the ‘American Dream’ would become the theme of many of Vonnegut's writings" (Vonnegut Bio). During World War II he was a prisoner of war after the Battle of the Bulge, and during his imprisonment witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The firebombing was an allied forces bombing raid that kill more people and did more damage than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. This incident servers as a primary story-line in his great anti-war book Slaughterhouse-5.
Later in life Vonnegut used these experiences as the basis for many of his stories. Throughout his life Vonnegut has been critical of military action and many of his books deal with the nature of technology in opposition to human morality. Kurt Vonnegut died in April of 2007.