Kurt Vonnegut, City News alum The following is from an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, entitled Kurt Vonnegut -- A very fringe character, in _An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995_:
But I had a wife and kids, and I wrote a thesis which was rejected by the U of C.
When I wasn't in class, I was working as a reporter at the Chicago City News Bureau. I also spent a lot of time with my family, rather than at the university ... And in the summers, other people would go off on digs or do fieldwork, but I couldn't. Because I had a wife and kids, I had to keep working.
...If everything had gone right, right now I would be an architect in Indianapolis. But instead I went to Cornell to be a chemist.
[Then he was in the Army in World War II, then went to the U of C.]
And if everything had gone right in Chicago, I would be a newspaper reporter or a managing editor -- or busting a strike.
The Chicago City News Bureau, where I worked when I was in graduate school, was a cocky operation. We were outlaws. It's where a lot of journalists in Chicago start. The theory was that working for City News was the only way you'd be able to get a job in a Chicago newspaper. You had to start there.
I could do at City News what I can't do now, which is walk into any part of town anywhere and start talking to people about their lives.
As a reporter, I'd go to police station after police station after police station, call on firehouses, and then I'd go and call the Coast Guard: "Anything going on?" For eight hours I'd be on the South Side, the North Side, the West Side.
We were all looking for everything. Some of the reporters carried guns.
One time I found a body.
I had started out as a copyboy, just stuck there in the office, waiting for somebody to move on so I could be a reporter. One Sunday I was there and had the police radio on. I heard that in an office building three blocks over, a guy had just been killed in an elevator accident. There was nobody else to go, so I went over, and I got there as soon as the fire department and police did.
The top of the elevator had come down and crushed the elevator operator. And so I got to see this guy squashed and dead.
I phoned the story in, and my editor said, "Okay, call up his wife. What does his wife say?"
I said, "I can't do that."
He said, "Yes you can."
Oh, it was so dishonorable! I wouldn't do it now. If I had worked at City News much longer, I probably would have gotten sick of it.
Still, being a journalist influenced me as a novelist. I mean, a lot of critics think I?tupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.
[Vonnegut also describes how, after having two theses rejected by the University of Chicago, he finally got his masters:]
It got worse. Finally I was on the faculty at Harvard, without a degree, and I had stopped bother Chicago. I received a letter from a guy at Chicago who had taken over the division of the social sciences.
He wrote, "I have just become dean of social sciences here, I was looking through a file, and I found an enormous envelope with your name on it. So I read it." And he added, "I am pleased to tell you that under the rules of the University, you have always been entitled to a master's degree, for having published a book of quality."
Cat's Cradle is what qualified me for a master?egree.
That novel was anthropology, but invented anthropology: in it, I wrote about an invented society.
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