Love, Kurt

Product Description

A never-before-seen collection of deeply intimate love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife, Jane, compiled and edited by their daughter and reproduced in gorgeous full color.

If ever I do write anything of length--good or bad--it will be written with you in mind.

Kurt Vonnegut's oldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty box. Inside were more than two-hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship- from 1941, when nineteen-year-old Kurt heads off to college, to his deployment to Europe in 1944 and the couple's marriage in 1945. The letters are full of the humor and wit that we have come to associate with Kurt Vonnegut. But they also show more private corners of his mind- Passionate and tender, the letters form an illuminating portrait of a young soldier's life in World War II as he attempts to come to grips with love and mortality. And they expose the origins of Vonnegut the writer, when Jane was the only person who believed in and supported him, and they had no idea how celebrated he would become.

A beautiful full-color collection of handwritten letters, notes, sketches, and comics, interspersed with Edith's insights and family memories, Love, Kurt is an intimate record of a young man growing into himself, a fascinating account of a writer finding his voice, and a moving testament to the life-altering experience of falling in love.A never-before-seen collection of deeply intimate love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his first wife, Jane, compiled and edited by their daughter and reproduced in gorgeous full color.

If ever I do write anything of length--good or bad--it will be written with you in mind.

Kurt Vonnegut's oldest daughter, Edith, was cleaning out her mother's attic when she stumbled upon a dusty box. Inside were more than two-hundred love letters written by Kurt to Jane, spanning the early years of their relationship- from 1941, when nineteen-year-old Kurt heads off to college, to his deployment to Europe in 1944 and the couple's marriage in 1945. The letters are full of the humor and wit that we have come to associate with Kurt Vonnegut. But they also show more private corners of his mind- Passionate and tender, the letters form an illuminating portrait of a young soldier's life in World War II as he attempts to come to grips with love and mortality. And they expose the origins of Vonnegut the writer, when Jane was the only person who believed in and supported him, and they had no idea how celebrated he would become.

A beautiful full-color collection of handwritten letters, notes, sketches, and comics, interspersed with Edith's insights and family memories, Love, Kurt is an intimate record of a young man growing into himself, a fascinating account of a writer finding his voice, and a moving testament to the life-altering experience of falling in love.
Kurt Vonnegut's black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959, and established him as a true artist (The New York Times) with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, one of the best living American writers. Kurt Vonnegut died in April 2007.

Edith Edie Vonnegut is Kurt Vonnegut's oldest daughter. She was born in Schenectady, New York in 1949, and raised in Barnstable, Massachusetts. She works as a painter and has exhibited in galleries across the United States. She wrote and illustrated the book Domestic Goddesses. She has also served as a contributing illustrator to The New York Times Op-Ed page and Playboy. She lives in the barn behind the house she grew up in with her husband, John, and has two sons and two grandchildren.