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  • Published: 3 November 1992
  • ISBN: 9780099842804
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $30.00

God Bless You, Mr Rosewater




The story of a man who reacts to past tragedy, family greed and fabulous wealth by promptly going insane

With the satirical eye of his science fiction author alter ego Kilgore Trout, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five delivers a classic of modern American literature.

Eliot Rosewater, President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation and volunteer firefighter, is tortured by an inheritance he doesn’t feel that he deserves. After (unfortunately) developing a social conscience, he sets out on a drunken tour of America, unravelling a little more at every stop until his path crosses with the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is one of Kurt Vonnegut’s funniest satires, about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.

  • Published: 3 November 1992
  • ISBN: 9780099842804
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $30.00

About the author

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and studied biochemistry at Cornell University. An army intelligence scout during the Second World War, he was captured by the Germans and witnessed the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, an experience which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After the war he worked as a police reporter, an advertising copywriter and a public relations man for General Electric. His first novel Player Piano (1952) achieved underground success. Cat's Cradle (1963) was hailed by Graham Greene as 'one of the best novels of the year by one of the ablest living authors'. His eighth book, Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969 and was a literary and commercial success, and was made into a film in 1972. Vonnegut is the author of thirteen other novels, three collections of stories and five non-fiction books. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

Also by Kurt Vonnegut

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Praise for God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

Vonnegut faces up to the less glamorous phenomenon of human mediocrity in this sharp, hilarious, boundlessly humane story. It taught me about compassion and a few things about writing good dialogue

Michel Faber, Glasgow Herald

Rumbustious stuff... There may be greater novelists than Vonnegut, but there can be a few, if any, with as much good humour and generosity

Guardian

Filled with irony and black humour and a woozy bonhomie

Sunday Times

Wild hilarity

Sunday Telegraph

Extremely funny

Observer