Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died yesterday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them bestsellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic. Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the German city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
He spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POWs in an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War. It solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much," Vidal said. "Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, making ends meet in his early years as a novelist by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the Earth.
Many of his novels were bestsellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.
His characters tended to be miserable antiheroes with little control over their fate. Pilgrim was a lonely goof. The hero of "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" was an obese volunteer fireman.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet. "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard . . . and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years but continued to publish short articles. He had a bestseller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction.
Vonnegut adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter with his second wife, Krementz.
this occurred at an empty esso gas station pump this evening at about 7:15 pm. 
