Vonnegut Inc.

FOR A FEW MONTHS in 1950, Kurt Vonnegut juggled three different careers. While he was working as a publicist at GE, he was also dreaming about being a writer. That dream—and its lack of compensation—eventually led to his third and most unlikely profession: fashion designer. Vonnegut imagined a trendy bow tie made out of the ribbon the Atomic Energy Commission used to rope off radioactive hotspots. He pieced together a prototype and sent it to a friend in the clothing industry. They would cash in on Cold War anxieties, Vonnegut predicted. “You can make them as lousy as you damn please,” he wrote, “teenagers being what they are.”

The bow tie never materialized, and two years later, Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano. But it wasn’t until 1969’s Slaughterhouse-Five that he became a literary star—the kind of author who no longer needed sartorial side hustles. By the time he died in 2007, Vonnegut was an icon, equal parts uncle and oracle. Millions of readers loved his essays and fiction, loved the way he could veer from charming to bleak and back again. He was America’s commencement speaker, its creative-writing teacher, its leading sci-fihumanist.

Then something strange happened. In the years aft er Vonnegut’s death, books by and about him