Breakfast of Champions

eForeword

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane” — so reads the epitaph for Kilgore Trout, who is one of several alter egos of the author Kurt Vonnegut in his explosively funny and ironic 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. The world Vonnegut explores is not a healthy one — as the title suggests, it is the United States of America in the age of Vietnam, Nixon and the Silent Majority — but it is desperately trying to seem so. An obscure science fiction writer takes a wild road trip to the middle of the Midwest, where his fate becomes intertwined with that of a successful car dealer who is slowly going mad. Vonnegut takes this opportunity to question a number of assumptions, including the very nature of the novel he is writing. A tour de force of imagination and scathing insight, Breakfast of Champions is one of the most discussed and widely read American novels of the late 20th century.

The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922) occupies an unusual but enduring place in modern American fiction, that of the prolific, critically acclaimed writer whose work has also enjoyed enormous popularity and inspired a virtual cult following. Vonnegut’s first work appeared in the early 1950s, and few writers have captured the modern age as consistently and as imaginatively as he has. Often blending satire with science fiction, Vonnegut’s writing reflects an acute sense of the ironies in modern American life. Nowhere is his richly ambivalent feeling about the contemporary American scene more brilliantly realized than in Breakfast of Champions , published just after Vonnegut’s 50th birthday, ending a four-year hiatus that followed appearance of Slaughterhouse Five.

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Other Vonnegut titles available from RosettaBooks include Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and Player Piano.