Unstuck In Time
A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Unstuck in Time is a passionate and insightful journey through the life of one of America's most-loved author's, Kurt Vonnegut. Gregory Sumner guides us through Vonnegut's best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano, including the iconic Slaughterhouse Five, and all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country, to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the 'American Dream'.
Vonnegut's novels reflect his own resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and 'winners' over 'losers.' We share his outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality — something he once memorably described as 'an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness'.
Unstuck in Time reveals another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream characterised by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love. This is delightful, essential reading for those who remain enchanted by one of the giants of C20th American fiction.
‘A wonderful primer to Kurt Vonnegut's work. Every page brims with analytic insight, biographical revelation, and old-fashioned storytelling.' — Douglas Brinkley
GREGORY D. SUMNER is chair of history at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle. Sumner has been awarded summer fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has twice been William J. Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Université di Roma Tre.
