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In 1945 Vonnegut married Jane Cox, his childhood sweetheart. Her family belonged to the Vonnegut's social set. Shields links Vonnegut's attraction to Jane Cox to his formative years. A Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College, Jane Cox became Kurt's editor for 34 years and thus a mother figure. Kurt quit Cornell and enlisted in the army. Jane gave birth to Edith, Nanny and Mark and when Kurt's sister, Alice, died of cancer, Jane and Kurt adopted four of her children.

In 1951, on Cape Cod Vonnegut met Norman Mailer. "Mailer was my age (27) -- a college- educated infantry private and a world figure because of his Great War novel," Kurt says. Vonnegut knew he had a big book in him -- he had lived through the bombing of Dresden.

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I could not put this book down until I came to the chapter on Slaughterhouse Five. When it made number one on the New York Times, daughter Edie called it the Big Ka-boom.

Kurt's struggles as a freelance writer, PR man for G.E., professor at Iowa State and Harvard, intimidated husband and father of seven, survivor of the bombing as well as his mother's suicide on Mother's Day are riveting, but how did he sustain his drive to write at least 16 books?

Shields makes the point that Vonnegut had faith. Perseverance.

Haunted by unfriendly critics, he believed they were just snobs. It was true he hadn't made a systematic study of literature and he had never made a secret of getting his start writing for the glossies. Because Vonnegut wasn't of their ilk and didn't belong to the literati, he felt they wanted him "squashed like a bug," Shields writes.

But Vonnegut fooled his critics into thinking he was the Lady Gaga of American literature "by being a practitioner of what Freud calls 'the tendentious joke.'" This defies authority, but by inviting the reader into the joke, Vonnegut creates an alliance. In Breakfast of Champions he substituted a sketch, of an anus (his, he said) for his signature. He was an asshole, he explained; however "being an asshole was a human condition."