Vonnegut to Speak at Graduation

Vonnegut to Speak at Graduation

BY DAVID
KAPLAN

Rice News Staff

May 7, 1998

Kurt Vonnegut once said that he worried some about
why he writes books when presidents and generals do not read them.
The trick, he says, is to catch them at school “before they become
generals and senators and presidents and poison their minds with
humanity.”

That’s one reason why he gives commencement
speeches. From his Long Island home, Vonnegut says that he has found
that people tend to have fewer “immunities” and don’t “resist ideas”
as much when they are young. In his own life he picked up the
“intellectual and moral ideas and enthusiasms” from books he read
between the ages of 14 to 25.

For many readers, a Vonnegut novel is a similarly
stimulating experience. Books such as “Cat’s Cradle,” “Slaughterhouse
Five” and “Sirens of Titan” have thrilled and inspired generations of
college students and people of all ages.

Vonnegut will address the 85th graduating class at
Rice University on Saturday, May 9. Commencement ceremonies start at
8:30 a.m. in the Academic Quadrangle on the Main Street
campus.

Vonnegut is known for fiction writing that is
unpretentious, compassionate, funny and wildly imaginative. Atlantic
Monthly has described him as “probably our finest Black Humorist. …
We laugh in self-defense.” According to Time, Vonnegut is “George
Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer …
a zany but moral mad scientist at the controls of a literary time
machine.” Life observes that he is “a man disposed to deep and comic
reflections on the human dilemma.”

Vonnegut says that being asked to speak to the
Rice class of ’98 is “quite an honor.” He has given about five
commencement speeches and visits college campuses quite frequently to
give lectures. “They’re all custom-made,” he says. “I build them all
from scratch.”

After he lectures on campus Vonnegut says he’ll
often converse with students. He finds them “interesting, witty and
informed. TV has not made a fool of them,” he says. “I have every
reason to be fond of them.”

Recalling his own life as a student at Cornell,
Vonnegut says, “It was a nightmare because I had to be a chemistry
major or my father wouldn’t pay my tuition. I had no gift for it
whatsoever. I know what it’s like to be the dumbest kid in every
class.”

After Cornell he was a battalion scout during
World War II. He was “easily captured” as a prisoner of war, and
witnessed the destruction of Dresden. His war experiences fueled his
classic work “Slaughterhouse Five,” a book that expresses his
anti-war sentiments.

Before becoming a full-time fiction writer,
Vonnegut worked a variety of jobs. He was a police reporter for the
Chicago City News Bureau and “a flack” for the research laboratory at
General Electric. During that time he began writing short stories and
later a novel “that mocked General Electric.” He has also been the
Saab dealer for Cape Cod and “the entire English department in a
school for disturbed children.”

In 1970 he was the recipient of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters’ literary award.

For additional Commencement information visit
the following Web site:

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~alumni/commence.html