Preface. ''There is an almost intolerable sentimentality beneath everything I write.''

Science Fiction. ''The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works.''

Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway. ''Frank warned me against following anybody. 'Thinking the guy up ahead knows what he's doing is the most dangerous religion there is.'''

Teaching the Unteachable. ''That's the delightful part of the game, of course: the pretense that everybody who comes to a writers' conference is a writer. Other forms of innocent summer recreation immediately suggest themselves: a doctors' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a doctor; a lawyers' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a lawyer; and so on -- and maybe even a Kennedy conference, where everybody pretends to be somehow associated with the Kennedys.''

Yes, We Have No Nirvanas. ''Unitarians don't believe in anything. I am a Unitarian.''

Address to a Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970. ''Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes.''

Wampters, Foma
& Granfaloons (Opinions)
c. 1966-1974

© Gale Research, 1989.
Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Broadening Views, 1968-1988. ''Vonnegut had not stopped writing shorter prose entirely as his production of novels increased. In the mid 1960s he began to write essays, reviews, short travel accounts, and human-interest stories. ''Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway'' (1966) recounts a journey from Massachusetts to Florida on the Kennedy yacht crewing for their captain, Frank Wirtanen (whose name had been borrowed for the character of an American intelligence officer in Mother Night). ''Oversexed in Indianapolis'' (1970) is a review of a novel, Going All the Way, written by Dan Wakefield, another graduate of Shortridge High School. A couple of pieces published in 1969 deal with witnessing rocket launchings. Many of these compositions were collected in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons.

''A characteristic of this short nonfiction is that Vonnegut frequently includes himself directly, as he starts to do in his novels from the 1960s. He may write reportage, but he is open about who is reporting and how he feels about what he is reporting. One of the most interesting aspects of this material for the reader is the emergent relationship between observer-writer and subject. By revealing his attitudes to the subject he reveals much of himself. Vonnegut's association with the short story was far from over, however, and he prepared and introduced a new collection, Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), which included eleven of the twelve stories from Canary in a Cat House and fourteen others.''

© 1997-2005 Chris Huber, Durham NC (USA)  ·  Last Updated 02/05/05

Also by Chris Huber: Whyaduck Productions  ·  Which Circle?