Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American author known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. His body of work includes fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus years; further works have been published since his death.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. It received positive reviews yet sold poorly. In the years that followed, several well-regarded novels were published, including The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963), both of which were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. His short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, was published in 1968. Vonnegut's breakthrough came with his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which resonated with its anti-war sentiment amid the Vietnam War.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). He has been hailed for his darkly humorous commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his work, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction.

Vonnegut was known for his humanist ideals and served as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. He passed away on April 11, 2007, after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone.