The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five
About this audiobook
The story of Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, an enduring masterpiece on trauma and memory
Kurt Vonnegut was twenty years old when he enlisted in the United States Army. Less than two years later, he was captured by the Germans in the single deadliest US engagement of the war, the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a POW camp, then transferred to a work camp near Dresden, and held in a slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf where he survived the horrific firebombing that killed thousands and destroyed the city.
To the millions of fans of Vonnegut’s great novel Slaughterhouse-Five, these details are familiar. They’re told by the book’s author/narrator, and experienced by his enduring character Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who “has come unstuck in time.” Writing during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam conflict, with the novel, Vonnegut had, after more than two decades of struggle, taken trauma and created a work of art, one that still resonates today.
In The Writer’s Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut’s life and Slaughterhouse-Five through his work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer’s family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O’Brien. The Writer’s Crusade is a literary and biographical journey that probes fundamental questions about trauma, creativity, and the power of storytelling.
About the author
Journalist Tom Roston worked at The Nation and Vanity Fair, and was a senior editor at Premiere for more than a decade. His work has appeared in the New York Times and many other publications. He is the author of two previous books, I Lost It at the Video Store: A Filmmaker’s Oral History of a Vanished Era and The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World. He lives in Brooklyn.
Jim Frangione has narrated over 350 audiobooks, including all of J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Other favorites: The Chet and Bernie Mysteries, by Spencer Quinn, Dennis Lehane's Live By Night, The Drop, and World Gone By; Anton Chekhov's Fifty-Two Stories, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ben Tarnoff's The Bohemians, and most recently Philip Caputo's The Voyage. He's received over a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and was named one of Audible's Best Voices of 2016. He has narrated five books that AudioFile magazine selected as the Best Audiobooks of the Year: World Gone By (2015), Dark Carousel (2016), The Chosen and Lucy and Desi (both 2017), and J. R. Ward's The Sinner (2020). Jim is artistic director of Great Barrington Public Theater, a professional summer theater that develops and produces new plays for the stage.
