After Kurt Vonnegut Jr. had become wealthy from his best-selling 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, he wryly commented “that only one person benefited [from the aerial bombing of Dresden in World War II]… not two or five or ten. Just one.” That person, he told the interviewer, was himself.
It’s a characteristically incisive, witty observation from an author who has become famous for his darkly humorous perspective on the world. And in turn, the entire literary world has benefited from the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, perhaps the most noteworthy of his novels in a long and storied career.