The Battle of the Bulge was the last German offensive of World War II, a surprise attack on Allied territory around Antwerp that began on December 16, 1944. Three days later, Private Kurt Vonnegut Jr., newly arrived in Germany, was captured. Per the Smithsonian Magazine, Vonnegut’s family in Indianapolis received a telegram informing them only that he was now “missing in action.”

Five months later, Vonnegut, now in a repatriation camp, was finally able to contact his family and tell them he was alive. However, the details he shared of his capture and the trials of him and his fellow prisoners of war — herded to camps in cramped, unheated boxcars — were still harrowing: “On Christmas Eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about 150 of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Mühlberg, south of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year’s Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after 10 days of starvation, thirst, and exposure. But I didn’t.” (via Open Culture)

Vonnegut explained that, according to the Geneva Convention, officer-class soldiers were not required to work while kept as prisoners of war. “I am, as you know, a private,” he blackly wrote. As such, he was taken to Dresden to perform labor at a workcamp.

Despite the traumas of Dresden, on his return to the U.S. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was able to quickly set about building a life for himself alongside his growing literary ambitions. Within months, Vonnegut was married to a woman named Jane Marie Cox, whom he knew from high school, per Biography, and with whom Vonnegut would soon have three children.

The couple moved to Chicago, where Vonnegut enrolled in college and found work as a reporter for a local paper, according to the Kurt Vonnegut Society. Though Vonnegut was beginning to write more and more, his first concern was supporting his family. Relocating to New York, Vonnegut became a publicist for General Electric from 1947 to 1950, a job which Vonnegut noted brought him close to scientists and engineers and which informed much of the science fiction-infused writing that followed (per The New Republic).

Vonnegut continued to move between job but eventually made the move to full time writing. However, in the 1950s his family was set to experience another trauma: in 1958, Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband, James, both died within a 48-hour period, of cancer and in a car crash respectively (per the Kurt Vonnegut Society). They left behind four boys, three of whom the Vonneguts adopted, heaping greater pressure on the budding writer to gain greater success.

Kurt Vonnegut was now a major celebrity, with “Slaughterhouse-Five” making him a darling of the growing anti-war movement that emerged in response to U.S. intervention in Vietnam. But while the writer was enjoying the success that he had been working towards for a quarter of a century, his private life was beginning to fall apart.

Vonnegut had been married to his wife, Jane, since 1945. According to the New Yorker, the two had known each other since kindergarten, and had been childhood friends before hitting off a romantic relationship while Vonnegut was at Cornell. The same source details how Jane had been a key influence of Vonnegut throughout his early career, a sounding board for his ideas and a figure who would encourage him amid the scores of rejections he received when starting out.

But now Vonnegut was barely home, and when he was the two argued constantly. Per The Guardian, Jane had developed a growing interest in Christianity, and her newfound spirituality clashed with Vonnegut’s out-and-out atheism. The couple effectively split in 1970, and endured a painful dissolution of their marriage before eventually divorcing in 1979 (per the Daily Beast). The same year, Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz, who would remain his partner for the rest of his life.

As the decades rolled on, Kurt Vonnegut continued to write, though by the end of the 20th century he had turned away from fiction. His last novel, “Timequake,” was published in 1997 to mixed reviews, similar to the lukewarm reception received by much of his work in the ’80s and ’90s (via the Daily Beast). Vonnegut had previously abandoned the novel in favor of turning his hand to plays, and by the turn of the millennium he was writing journalism almost exclusively.

Vonnegut was still a popular public figure and speaker, but as he entered old age his growing world-weariness came to consume him. In 2006, Vonnegut, then 83 years old, gave an interview to Rolling Stone, in which he compared his mentality — he readiness for death — to waiting to be discharged at the end of World War II: “The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?” (via Notable Quotes).

Kurt Vonnegut enjoyed telling the story of his return to his family’s hometown of Indianapolis following “Slaughterhouse-Five” becoming a bestseller. He claimed that he was expected to be greeted by a rapturous reception — instead, he signed only a few copies of his book during a long signing session at a local bookstore, and they were mainly for family and friends.

But in the years since his death, the popularity of his work — especially “Slaughterhouse-Five” — has endured, and his writing is treasured as some of the most important novels of the century. On the 50th anniversary of the release of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library announced that it was partnering with Penguin Random House and the Indiana State Library to supply 86,000 copies of Vonnegut’s greatest novel to every sophomore in the state of Indiana.

His body of work continues to grow — numerous posthumous works have been published in recent years, including “Armageddon in Retrospect,” a collection of essays edited by Vonnegut’s son, Mark — as does academic interest. His writing is now discussed as a major achievement of American postmodernism. Not that Vonnegut himself would give that much thought; as he once so memorably explained: “​​I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different” (via BrainyQuote).