Whose Play Is It Anyway?
Part Two
Meet the author whose work inspired the play.
Who Am I This Time? is the brainchild of two American writers, famed novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Adaptor/Playwright Aaron Posner
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born the youngest of three children to Kurt Sr. and Edith in Indianapolis on November 11th, 1922. Although the prominent family owned a successful architecture business, the Vonneguts were not immune to the economic fall out of the Great Depression and ended up losing the family business and home. Vonnegut was in high school when World War II broke out and began attending Cornell University, but left to enlist in the army when he was 20. The army sent him to what is now Carnegie Mellon to study mechanical engineering before transferring him to the European theatre of war. In 1944, Vonnegut’s mother, who had struggled with mental illness since the Depression, committed suicide. Less than a year later, Vonnegut was taken prisoner of war by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and sent to Dresden just in time for the infamous firebombing of the city, an experience that would later inform his most famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
Upon returning home after the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, a childhood sweetheart. They moved to Chicago where Vonnegut worked as a reporter and studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago. They had three children. Upon the untimely death of Vonnegut’s sister and brother-in-law within one day of each other, the Vonneguts adopted their three nephews as well. After two years in Chicago, Vonnegut accepted a job in public relations with General Electric Co out of Schenectady New York. In 1950, Vonnegut sold his first short story and moved the family to Cape Cod. In 1952, he sold Player Piano, his first novel. Throughout the fifties and early sixties, Vonnegut wrote for various magazines and supplemented his income with a variety of “day jobs.” It is during this time that the three stories that serve as inspiration for Who Am I This Time?, “My Name is Everyone” (later retitled “Who Am I This Time?”), “Long Walk to Forever,” and “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” first appeared in popular magazines The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal before reappearing in his 1968 anthology Welcome to the Monkey House. Over a decade later, an adaptation of “Who Am I This Time” appeared on PBS, starring Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken. These heartwarming short stories have become less associated with Vonnegut’s generally dark, satirical, and anti-authoritarian writing style as established with the publications of several of his novels including Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan, and most notably, Slaughterhouse Five, which brought him international attention when it was published in 1969 and made him a popular figure in the counterculture movement. Around 1970, Vonnegut’s first marriage dissolved, and he moved to Manhattan to pursue playwriting. Upon receiving mixed reviews, he returned his focus to novels with the publication of Breakfast of Champions. It was in New York that he met his second wife, Jill Krementz, with whom he had a daughter. Vonnegut continued to write, albeit sporadically, the rest of his life. His final work, a series of essays entitled A Man Without a Country, appeared in 2005. He passed away two years later after a fall at the age of 84, having spent the last years of his life jokingly threatening to sue Pall Mall, his cigarette of choice, for not following through on its “promise” to kill him. |