Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop

 

It was 1965. Kurt Vonnegut was forty-two, broke, and tired. He’d written Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle, but money was scarce and readers scarcer yet. He was raising a house full of kids, patching together teaching jobs, and wondering if he should quit writing altogether. Then Paul Engle, from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, called. Robert Lowell had backed out, and he needed someone fast. Vonnegut said yes.

So here he was: a chain-smoking satirist from Indianapolis, driving into Iowa City in a beat-up car, wearing a brown jacket and a mustache that looked like it could write its own novel. Vonnegut wasn’t an academic. He wasn’t polished, and he didn’t have a college teaching degree. He was just trying to stay afloat.

He moved into a rented house on Summit Street, filled it with kids and typewriters, and made himself a routine. Up at 5:30. Write until eight. Teach during the day. Drink Scotch at 5:30. Cook dinner. Sleep at ten. Then do it all again. “Mornings are for writing,” he said. “And so are most of the afternoons.”

He found his rhythm again. Between classes and whiskey, the story that had haunted him for twenty years took shape—the bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five started there, in the flat light of Iowa City.

In the classroom, Vonnegut was everything students didn’t expect. He didn’t lecture. He laughed, doodled, told war stories, and called everyone “kid.” One student said, “He was passionate, indignant. He laughed at his own jokes. He was shy and kind.” Another remembered, “His classes were looser, funnier, more forgiving.”

Vonnegut didn’t believe in literary theory. He believed in people. “Every character should want something,” he told his students, “even if it’s only a glass of water.” He warned them not to show off, not to fake meaning. “Be cynical and religious,” he wrote in one assignment. “Love mystery. Love truth.”

His syllabus began with the words, “Beloved: Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.” That line said it all. He wasn’t teaching writing so much as teaching survival.

The Writer’s Workshop back then was a mix of talent and chaos—Richard Yates, José Donoso, Vance Bourjaily, John Irving, Gail Godwin. Iowa City was a literary circus. Vonnegut fit right in. He went to football games, drank beer with painters, argued politics in smoky bars, and stayed up too late. “Run with the painters,” he told a fellow teacher. “I did.”

Not everyone got him. Some thought he was too funny, too weird. He wrote about aliens and ice-nine while everyone else wrote about marriage and cornfields, but his students knew what he was doing. He was showing them how to write without fear.

In 1967, the world started calling again. Vonnegut won a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Dresden, the place that had burned into his memory as a POW in World War II. He packed up the family and left Iowa City behind. He was on his way to writing a book that would make him famous.

Years later, he said Iowa saved him. “No writer in all of history did as much to help other writers as Paul Engle,” he said. The Workshop had given him what he needed most—a tribe. A reason to keep going.

So what was Kurt Vonnegut doing in Iowa City? He was clawing his way back from obscurity. He was teaching young writers how to tell the truth without losing their sense of humor. He was rediscovering what made him human.

Out there among the cornfields, before the world caught up to him, Vonnegut became Vonnegut.

And so it goes.