Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner in Dresden when Allied bombers destroyed the city in February 1945. He and the other prisoners survived inside a meat locker and were then put to work digging bodies out of the rubble. Twenty-three years passed before he could write Slaughterhouse-Five about it. Earlier he had written publicity copy for General Electric, sold stories to magazines, and run a Saab dealership that failed. The Sirens of Titan is early and cheerfully bleak, free will handed over to an alien who needed a spare part. His mother died on Mother's Day in 1944, and he wrote about that and about his own collapse forty years later. A fall killed him in 2007.