WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND to BE: THE FIRST and LAST WORKS by Kurt Vonnegut
Published in 2012 by Vanguard Press. The giant mural honoring Vonnegut in downtown Indianapolis. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is from Indianapolis, the city I have lived in since 1998. He was always proud to be FROM Indianapolis but never moved back once he and his family moved away right after World War II. His sense of humor and cynical/sarcastic of view has often been compared to Mark Twain, but I am reminded of the humor of another Indianapolis boy a few years later who also went off to the big city and made it big - David Letterman. This book contains the first real story written by Vonnegut and the beginning of the novel he was working on when he passed away. These are the bookends of his literary career. The first story is called Basic Training . It was written when he was about age 30 and was never published. His daughter describes stacks of rejection letters and one can assume that this story helped create that stack. The story is about a recently orphaned teenaged boy who