Appearances in Vonnegut's novels
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- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- Breakfast of Champions (1973)
- Hocus Pocus (1990)
| Eliot Rosewater | |
|---|---|
| Created by | Kurt Vonnegut |
| In-universe information | |
| Species | Human |
| Gender | Male |
| Nationality | American |
Eliot Rosewater is a recurring character in the novels of American author Kurt Vonnegut. [1] He appears throughout various novels as an alcoholic, and a philanthropist who claims to be a volunteer fireman. He runs the Rosewater Foundation, an organization created to keep the family's money in the family. He is among the few fans of the novels of Kilgore Trout (another of Vonnegut's creations).
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or, Pearls Before Swine, the first of Vonnegut's novels to feature the character of Eliot Rosewater, is also the one in which he is the most prominent. [2]
The 1965 novel follows much of his life as the liberal son of a rich, conservative Senator from Rosewater County, Indiana who founded the Rosewater Foundation. [3] Eliot Rosewater is convinced that he should spend the family riches to help the poor and uses the Foundation to this end, an idea looked down upon by his father. [4] Norman Mushari, an opportunistic former associate of the Rosewater family lawyer, attempts to have Eliot declared insane so that the family wealth can be inherited by his new client, a distant relative to the east. This and other crises lead to a year-long mental blackout, after which Rosewater's favorite writer, Kilgore Trout, tries to explain to the Senator that Eliot's actions were sane and compassionate.
The New York Times called it "[Vonnegut] at his wildest best" and Conrad Aiken said that it's "a brilliantly funny satire on almost everything". [3]
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade, first published in 1969, features Eliot Rosewater in Chapter Five. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the novel, has committed himself to a psychiatric hospital during his last year of optometry school, and finds himself sharing a room with Eliot Rosewater. Eliot introduces Billy Pilgrim to the works of Kilgore Trout, which set the foundation for Billy's adventures through time and with the Tralfamadorians, aliens that Billy claims abducted him. [5]
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The Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award (often shortened to Rosie Award) is given to one young adult book each year as selected by Indiana high school students. [1] [2]
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman. The work has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity" and "one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time".
Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio, and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city, and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author. Breakfast of Champions deals with themes of free will, suicide, and race relations, among others. The novel is full of drawings by the author, substituting descriptive language with depictions requiring no translation.
Timequake is a 1997 semi-autobiographical work by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Marketed as a novel, the book was described as a "stew" by Vonnegut, in which he summarizes a novel he had been struggling with for a number of years.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, Kurt Vonnegut's fifth novel, was published in 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and as a Dell mass-market paperback in 1970. A piece of postmodern satire, it gave context to Vonnegut's following novel, Slaughterhouse-Five and shared in its success.
Pearls Before Swine may refer to:
Tralfamadore is the name of several fictional planets in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Details of the corresponding indigenous alien race, the Tralfamadorians, vary from novel to novel:
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a collection of short fictional interviews written by Vonnegut and first broadcast on WNYC. The title parodies that of Vonnegut's 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It was published in book form in 1999.
Kilgore Trout is a fictional character created by author Kurt Vonnegut. Trout is a notably unsuccessful author of paperback science fiction novels.
Galápagos (1985) is the eleventh novel published by American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the Galápagos Islands after a global financial disaster, the novel questions the merit of the human brain from an evolutionary perspective. The title is both a reference to the islands on which part of the story plays out, and a tribute to Charles Darwin, on whose theory Vonnegut relies to reach his own conclusions. It was published by Delacorte Press.
Ilium is a fictional town in eastern New York state, used as a setting for many of Kurt Vonnegut's novels and stories, including Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and the stories "Deer in the Works", "Poor Little Rich Town", and "Ed Luby's Key Club". The town is dominated by its major industry leader, the Ilium Works, which produces scientific marvels to assist, or possibly harm, human life. The Ilium Works is Vonnegut's symbol for the "impersonal corporate giant" with the power to alter humankind's destiny. The town has been compared to Zenith, the fictional setting in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt.
Venus on the Half-Shell is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip José Farmer, writing pseudonymously as "Kilgore Trout", a fictional recurring character in many of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. This book first appeared as a fictitious "excerpt"—attributed to Trout —in the ninth chapter of Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). With Vonnegut's permission, Farmer expanded the fragment into an entire standalone novel. Farmer's story was first published in two parts beginning in the December 1974 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The plot, in which Earth is destroyed by cosmic bureaucrats doing routine maintenance and the sole human survivor goes on a quest to find the "Definitive Answer to the Ultimate Question", was an inspiration for the plot of the later Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
The RAMJAC Corporation is a fictional multinational conglomerate, or megacorp, featured in several novels by Kurt Vonnegut. In Vonnegut's 1979 novel, Jailbird, the company at its height owns 19 percent of the United States, twice as large as the next largest conglomerate in the "Free World". Copyrights on Vonnegut's later books are also held by RAMJAC, much like Isaac Asimov's later copyrights are held by Nightfall, Inc.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1972 American comedy-drama military science fiction film directed by George Roy Hill and produced by Paul Monash, from a screenplay by Stephen Geller, based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Kurt Vonnegut. The film stars Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, who is "unstuck in time" and has no control over where he is going next. It also stars Ron Leibman as Paul Lazzaro and Valerie Perrine as Montana Wildhack.
Palm Sunday is a 1981 collection of short stories, speeches, essays, letters, and other previously unpublished works by Kurt Vonnegut.
Fates Worse than Death, subtitled An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, is a 1991 collection of essays, speeches, and other previously uncollected writings by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In the introduction to the book, Vonnegut acknowledges that the book is similar to an earlier book, Palm Sunday. In it he discusses his attempted suicide.
Breakfast of Champions is a 1999 American satirical black comedy film adapted and directed by Alan Rudolph, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1973 novel of the same name. Though the producers entered it into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival, the film was negatively received by critics and was a box office bomb that was withdrawn from theatres before going into wide release. It has not yet been given a digital release.
A Barcalounger is a type of recliner that originated from Buffalo, New York, and is named after the company which manufactured it. Like other recliners, Barcaloungers have moving parts to change things such as the inclination of the back. Since the 2010 bankruptcy and 2011 re-emergence, they have been made in China.
"2 B R 0 2 B" is a science fiction short story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in the digest magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction for January 1962, and collected in Vonnegut's Bagombo Snuff Box (1999). The title is pronounced "2 B R naught 2 B" and references the famous phrase "to be, or not to be" from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a 1979 musical that marked the first collaboration of composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman. Based on Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel of the same name, the musical tells the story of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire who develops a social conscience and creates a foundation to improve the lives of the citizens of an impoverished Indiana town.
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