Slaughterhouse
Five
Kurt Vonnegut's
novel, Slaughterhouse Five, was created from his experiences during
WW II. The novel takes place during "..what he believes to have
been 11 days, he wandered around as an infantry scout, improvising
his own tactics (all his training had been in artillery),
not knowing where the lines were or whether there were any lines,
and living with death in a cartoonic embrace. As a groggy war prisoner
he witnessed the bombing of Dresden, "a terrible thing for the
son of an architect to see." (Wilford Sheed, The Now Generation
Knew Him When, 9-12-69, pg. C9)
Bruce Severy, an English teacher at Drake High School in North Dakota
ordered Slaughterhouse Five for one of his classes. "On 7 November
(1973), Mrs. Sheldon Summers, school custodian, burned
32 copies of the book because the board members had decided that it
was pornographic."
(Modern Fiction Studies, Kurt Vonnegut on Censorship and Moral
Values, Vol. 26. Iss. 4. 1981, pg. 683)
The Board of Education did not reconsider its actions.
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