Author Facts

• That time Vonnegut graded his own books. He gave himself an A+ for Slaughterhouse Five, a B- for Welcome to the Monkey House, a C for Breakfast of Champions, and a D forHappy Birthday, Wanda June. 
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• Speaking of grades, Vonnegut had to leave Butler University in Indiana after being unable to manage more than a C in his English courses. Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Kurt Vonnegut… was there a famous smart person who actually did WELL in school?
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• Speaking of higher education, apparently, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, mechanical engineering, and anthropology at a few different colleges but never completed any of his majors during his lifetime.
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• here’s a really fun claim that Dr. Seuss and Kurt Vonnegut were college classmates and fraternity brothers that was disproved by Snopes. Boo, I hate when the lie out-awesomes the truth. Still, there is a fun fact in here–according to Vonnegut, in a piece from his autobiographical collage A Fate Worse Than Death, in the building used by Vonnegut’s fraternity there WERE a bunch of cartoons on the wall penciled by Theodore Geisel AKA Seuss. So the truth has a SCOCH of weird to it.
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• Towards the middle of February 1976, Vonnegut’s mailbox filled up with sympathy cards from strangers but NO ONE HAD DIED. Finally, Vonnegut remembered that February 13, 1976 was the day Billy Pilgrim dies in Slaughterhouse-Five. 
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• He survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1944 only to be sent home with frostbite in 1945. No wonder Vonnegut wrote the way he did. Vonnegut’s life was a Vonnegut story.
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• Vonnegut was a luddite who never switched to computers because he loved the tactile feeling of writing on a typewriter. Kurt, you were such a gangster. Kurt, you were also SUCH an old person.
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• Vonnegut was a lifelong smoker, which in itself is not weird, but his reasoning, that it was “a classy way to commit suicide,”. 
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• According to the Saturday Evening Post, Vonnegut always wrote by the light of his red rooster lamp.