Influential Author Kurt Vonnegut Dies at Age 84

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• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Kurt Vonnegut's books, a reviewer once wrote, are "like nothing else on Earth." Several generations of readers agreed.

  Known for his dark humor and often compared to Mark Twain for his social bite, the mustachioed, chain-smoking Vonnegut created alternate, fantastic worlds for his characters, many based on his own life.

  Beginning in 1952 with "Player Piano," Vonnegut wrote 14 novels, including "Cat's Cradle," "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," and "Breakfast of Champions." The last, "Timequake," was published in 1997. He also wrote plays and nonfiction.

  Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and served in the Army during World War II. He was held as a prisoner in the German city of Dresden during the allied firebombing of the city in which many thousands were killed. It was an experience that shaped his strong anti-war views.

  Vonnegut spoke on the NewsHour on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

• ROBERT MACNEIL, Former NewsHour Host:

  Kurt Vonnegut, can you tell us where you were 40 years ago and what you thought about the bomb being dropped?

• KURT VONNEGUT, Author:

  My brother was with me. And when we heard the news, he was able to gauge the enormity of this news because he was a physicist. He is Dr. Vonnegut.

  And he understood immediately that a new, absolutely intolerable dimension of weapon had come into the world. And so he brought that home to me very quickly. And I had seen devastation, not at all on that order, but tending in that direction, of course, in the firebombing of Dresden.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  The Dresden experience also shaped the novel that catapulted Vonnegut to a kind of cult fame, "Slaughterhouse-Five," the story of Billy Pilgrim, a young World War II POW. Published in 1969 to wide acclaim amid the Vietnam War, it was made into a movie in 1972.

  Many of Vonnegut's novels were bestsellers. Some were the target of attempted bans for alleged obscenity.

• KURT VONNEGUT:

  It distresses me deeply that ideas are not to be circulated freely in this country if certain persons have their way. One of the things that was great about this country was that I could say anything and that everyone else could say anything and we would compare all possible ideas and arrive at opinions.

• JEFFREY BROWN:

  Prone to bouts of severe depression, Vonnegut attempted suicide in 1984. His mother had taken her own life during World War II.

  On the PBS program "Now" in 2005, Vonnegut talked about the search for happiness, as he described two characters in "Slaughterhouse-Five," based on his uncles — one good, one bad — and what the good uncle thought humans were missing.

• KURT VONNEGUT:

  What he found objectionable about human beings was they never noticed it when they were really happy.

  So whenever he was really happy, you know, he could be sitting around in the shade, in the summertime, in the shade of an apple tree, and drinking lemonade and talking, you know, just sort of back-and-forth buzzing like honey bees. And Uncle Alex would all of a sudden say, "If this isn't nice, what is?" And then we'd realize how happy we were, and we might have missed it.

  And the bad Uncle Dan was when I came home from the war, which was quite painful. He clapped me on the back and said, "You're a man now." I wanted to kill him.