We Love Kurt Vonnegut
At his best in this famous interview from the Paris Review in 1977. Interesting to see that he got an anthropology MA for Cat's Cradle, and that the idea for that book had first been rejected by HG Wells:
"VONNEGUT
Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absentminded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the GE research laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded... One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn't tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes.
INTERVIEWER
Yes?
VONNEGUT
Anyway—Wells came to Schenectady, and Langmuir was told to be his host. Langmuir thought he might entertain Wells with an idea for a science-fiction story—about a form of ice that was stable at room temperature. Wells was uninterested, or at least never used the idea. And then Wells died, and then, finally, Langmuir died. I thought to myself: finders, keepers—the idea is mine. Langmuir, incidentally, was the first scientist in private industry to win a Nobel Prize."
Also that the brilliant Slapstick was so hated then that it made critics want to 'squash me like a bug'. Stupid people of 1977...