Kurt Vonnegut will always be thought of first as the author of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which expressed the 1960s American generation’s rejection of war as a means of achieving either state policy or human good.

Published in 1969, during the mounting protests against the Vietnam War, it also increased public awareness of the tremendous loss of life that had been caused by the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, notwithstanding that this had been described by David Irving in his account The Destruction of Dresden, several years previously (a best-selling book from the period before its author turned apologist for Hitler).

The bombing of Dresden is a subject that has been often revisited since, and it continues to vex consciences to this day.

Vonnegut’s work — though consistently ironical, distanced and even flippant in tone — was haunted by strong feelings about the insanity of the war in which he had participated as an American infantryman, and of the grotesque nature of the cruelty practised upon mankind by itself.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in 1922, in Indianapolis of long-settled German immigrant stock. He read chemistry at Cornell and in 1942 was called up into the US Army. After D-Day he served in the campaign in northwest Europe. Here, as a scout to an infantry regiment, he was captured during the German Ardennes counter-offen-sive in the winter of 1944 and sent as a prisoner of war to apparent safety in the Saxon capital, Dresden.

It was here, from the unusual vantage-point of Slachthof fönf, the subterranean meat locker that was to give its name to his best-known book, that he witnessed the work of RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th Army Air Force, which almost totally destroyed the city on the night of February 13-14, 1945, leaving a number of dead that has been put by some German authorities as high as 135,000 — though the actual figure is probably nearer 30,000.

After the war Vonnegut continued his studies at Chicago University, worked for some time as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau and did various other odd jobs, including running a nappy-cleaning service and working for General Electric. After publishing a number of short stories with magazines such as Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post, Vonnegut wrote his first novel, and gave up his job to write full time.

Player Piano(1952), a lengthy and serious look at a future automated world controlled by a handful of company bureaucrats, gave no hint of the ellipsis and compression that were to become Vonnegut’s hall-mark.

The Sirens of Titan(1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) developed his use of science fiction as a vehicle for satire and it was this, together with his own war experience, that gave Slaughter-house-Five its peculiar impact when it appeared in 1969.

Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout captured in the Ardennes, follows in his author’s footsteps and witnesses the bombing of Dresden. He subsequently returns to the commercially dynamic cultural desert of his home town in Middle America, and is then spirited away by extra terrestrial beings, from whose perspective the monstrosity of human behaviour is obvious.

The book was immensely successful and was translated into a film. It caught the mood of disillusion arising from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and indeed scepticism over war in general, already given vent in Joseph Heller’s satirical account of US forces in Italy in the Second World War, Catch22, which had appeared in 1961. But the verbal relish of Catch22 was completely absent from Slaughterhouse-Five. It was as if Vonnegut’s years of meditation on the terrible events he had witnessed had reduced him almost to silence on the subject.

And in truth Vonnegut was, arguably, at his best not here, but in Mother Night, which had appeared in 1961. The protagonist of that book is an American who becomes, apparently, a Nazi propagandist who broadcasts nightly, but is in reality an American spy. He finds himself rejected by the American Government at the end of the war and spends lonely years in hiding in New York before being discovered and then tried for war crimes by the Israelis.

Here Vonnegut’s ability to delineate the physical horrors of war was under better control. The economy of his writing helped to evoke the fearful nature of domestic life in Berlin in the calm before the final Russian assault; the horror of the Allied arrival at the limepits of the concentration camps; and the meaning of the dreadful refrain “ Leichenträger zur Wache” (“Corpse carriers to the guardhouse!”), still crooned in remembered fascination by the novel’s New York Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

But Mother Night does more: it explores war’s capacity to destroy man’s sense of his own identity; it strips the work of the spy of all glamour; and it leaves its characters individually determined, at the end, to assert at least some remnant of their integrity. As a novel about the complete corruption that stems from the first small step along the path of official untruth, it deserves wider currency than many of Vonnegut’s more acclaimed books.

Vonnegut continued writing prolifically after Slaughter-house-Five.A play, Happy Birthday Wanda June (1970), ran for more than 100 performances on Broadway and was later filmed with Rod Steiger and Susannah York. There were, too, more novels at regular intervals, many of them featuring an increasingly important protagonist and alter ego figure, Kilgore Trout (based to some extent on the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), who had first appeared in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, and was featured in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Among them were Breakfast of Champions (1973), where Trout became a central figure; Slapstick (1976); Jailbird (1979) — Trout again; Deadeye Dick (1982); Galapagos(1985), narrated by Trout’s son, Leon; and Timequake (1997). Opinion was divided about these. They were rich in the satirical devices that were Vonnegut’s trademark. But even his devotees found that the creative insight, in particular the genuine imaginative sorrow over humanity’s capacity to wound itself, was not there as it had been in their predecessors.

The books were increasingly pessimistic, but this reflected Vonnegut’s own increasing disillusionment with life. In 1984

he had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of barbit-urates, but was found and pumped out before the drugs could take effect. Timequake had been intended — and advertised — as Vonnegut’s final work, the one in which he took formal leave of creativity, somewhat in the same manner as Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. It featured, again, Trout, as the vehicle of this renunciation.

Vonnegut became increasingly interested in graphic art. He did illustrations for Slaughter-house-Five, and he doodled throughout the pages of Breakfast of Champions. In the 1990s he pursued an interest in silk-screen printing.

In January 2000 the top floor of his home was destroyed by fire and many of his personal archives destroyed. His lungs were seriously affected by smoke and he spent some time in hospital, in a critical condition for the first few days of his stay.

He survived to teach an advanced writing course at Smith College, and continued, also, to write magazine articles on topics ranging from political satire, particularly his contempt for the Bush Administration, to wry observation of daily life. A collection of these was published in 2005 as A Man Without a Country. This, to his surprise, became a best-seller, a circumstance he referred to gratefully as “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life”.

Kurt Vonnegut was twice married: first, in 1945 to Jane Marie Cox. This marriage was dissolved in 1979 and in that year he married the photographer Jill Krementz. There were a son and two daughters of his first marriage. In addition he adopted three sons of his sister whose husband was killed in a train crash, soon after which she died of cancer. He and his second wife also adopted a daughter. His daughter, Edith Vonnegut, is a painter, best known for her Domestic God-desses images, collected in a book of that title. His son, Mark, is a paediatrician who wrote The Eden Express: a Memoir of Insanity(1975) an account of a 1960s drug-induced breakdown.

Vonnegut sustained brain damage from a fall some weeks ago at his New York home.

Kurt Vonnegut, novelist, was born on November 11, 1922. He died on April 11, 2007, aged 84