Biography of Kurt Vonnegut Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Biography of Kurt Vonnegut - Essay Example After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He described his work there in the late 1940s in terms that could have been used by almost any other City Press reporter of any era: "Well, the Chicago City News Bureau was a tripwire for all the newspapers in town when I was there, and there were five papers, I think. We were out all the time around the clock and every time we came across a really juicy murder or scandal or whatever, they’d send the big time reporters and photographers, otherwise, they’d run our stories. So that’s what I was doing, and I was going to university at the same time." Vonnegut admitted that he was a poor anthropology student, with one professor remarking that some of the students were going to be professional anthropologists and he was not one of them. According to Vonnegut in Bagombo Snuff Box, the university rejected his first thesis o n the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painters and the leaders of late 19th Century Native American uprisings, saying it was unprofessional. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York, in public relations for General Electric, where his brother Bernard worked in the research department. Vonnegut was a technical writer but was also known for writing well past his typical hours while working. While in Schenectady, Vonnegut lived in the tiny hamlet of Alplaus, just across the Mohawk River from the city of Schenectady.