Vonnegut Dead at 84

One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., passed away yesterday.  I didn't hear much about it in the news so I wanted to take a moment and post about it.  While Vonnegut was a novelist and speaker, he was very much the outsider politician, speaking at universities and town halls.

At Oklahoma City University (my future alma mater) in 2003, I heard Vonnegut speak and watched as the Conservative crowd (primarily because it's Oklahoma, but also because it was at the beginning of the Iraq War) stood up and walked out one by one as Vonnegut's rants about President Bush went on and on.  The man even had the nerve (charisma!) to say at one of America's finest performing arts universities,

"If you ever want to break your parents' hearts, and you don't have the stomach to be a homosexual, go into the arts."

More about Vonnegut's passing and a brief bio about him at MyWay News.

Great article at Cleveland.com:  "Vonnegut:  Provocative, Harrowing, and Funny to the End."