Kurt Vonnegut, the Sophomore's Sage

style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">The author as jerk is a perennial character in literary circles. Indeed the man who is a god on the page but a devil off it is almost a literary cliché in itself. Rarely, however, has the chasm between an author’s work and his life seemed as wide as it does in Charles J Shields’ new biography of Kurt Vonnegut.