Smash hit

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 Slaughterhouse 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 barbiturates, 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, and Vonnegut himself, introduced (as he had been in Breakfast of Champions) as the omniscient deus-ex-machina author figure.

Vonnegut became increasingly interested in graphic art. He did illustrations for Slaughterhouse 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 bestseller, 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, with whom he had lived from 1970.

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, shortly 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 Goddesses images, collected in a book of that title. His son Mark is a paediatrician who wrote the memoir The Eden Express: a Memoir of Insanity (1975) an account of a Sixties’ drug induced breakdown. Vonnegut himself sustained brain damage in 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

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