Main Article Content
Abstract
Of course, major American writers have rarely achieved great popular success within their lifetimes, so the oddity is perhaps that Vonnegut was talked about so much for so many years, not that his works no longer provoke Hemingwayesque discussion. Certainly it should not surprise us that Vonnegut's critical reputation is now unstable, for its earlier fluctuations are among the most pronounced in American literary history. Almost totally ignored for the first twenty years of his career, Vonnegut suddenly became, in the late 1960s, the sort of writer whose portrait graces the cover of Harper's and whose books are reviewed everywhere. In the 1970s and early 1980s Vonnegut popularity translated into a vast critical industry that produced 265 critical studies, including eight books and two journal issues almost entirely devoted to his works.4 If such massive evidence of critical interest has begun to abate, this may only mean that a lot of people have had their say about Vonnegut. In any case, the following account of Vonnegut's critical reputation will chart the curves of his fascinating career in order to characterize 'what has already been said and what perhaps still needs to be said about one postmodern American novelist who really matters.