April 13, 2007	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24, 1428

NEW YORK: American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose works blended science fiction and black comedy built on his experience as Nazi prisoner of war, has died at the age of 84, his publisher said on Thursday.

Vonnegut, best known for “Cat's Cradle,” “Breakfast of Champions” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” widely rated as one of the best American novels of the 20th century, died on Wednesday in New York, a Random House spokeswoman said.

Vonnegut suffered brain injuries in a fall several weeks ago, his longtime friend Morgan Entrekin told the New York Times. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1922, Vonnegut was captured inside German lines in 1945 following the Battle of the Bulge. Confined to an underground meat-packing cellar in Dresden when Allied bombers descended upon the city, he was one of just seven US prisoners who survived the devastating firestorm that engulfed the city.

That experience formed the core of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” published in the midst of the furor over the Vietnam war in 1969 to widespread acclaim. After the war he moved to Chicago where he worked as a local police reporter and entered the University of Chicago in pursuit of a master's degree in anthropology. His thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales,” was famously rejected by all the members of a faculty panel, and he only earned the degree in 1971 when the university accepted “Cat's Cradle” as the thesis.

In 1947 he moved to New York and began writing for magazines and took up odd jobs. He published his first of 14 novels in 1952.

His next book, “The Sirens of Titan,” came out in 1959, another science fiction novel heavy with satire and featuring the “Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.” But he made his name in 1963 with “Cat's Cradle.” —AFP