Kurt Vonnegut gained notoriety and acclaim for his novels -- like Breakfast of Champions, “a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973,” with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion, Cat's Cradle, a satirical commentary on modern man and his madness,” and Slaughterhouse-Five, “one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.”
But it was his rejected master thesis in anthropology that he called his “prettiest contribution to his culture.”
“The shapes of a society's stories,” he said, “is at least as interesting as the shapes of its pots and spearheads.”
[via]