This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut"s fiction. These letters written over a sixty-year period are funny, moving and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp which became the seed of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then suddenly dealing with international fame in middle age; brilliant, razor-sharp letters of protest to school boards that had tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, friends and family; letters to contemporaries like Norman Mailer, Gail Godwin, Gunter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view on the world that made him...