Remember: Kurt Vonnegut was 47

The Long Apprenticeship

At forty-seven, Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five. He had been a struggling writer, a car salesman, a PR man at General Electric, and a failed playwright. He had seen war firsthand, lived through firebombs, raised six children (four of them adopted after his sister’s death), and produced a shelf of novels that garnered little attention. Then suddenly, almost accidentally, he became one of the most important American voices of the twentieth century. When people recall Vonnegut now, they picture the wry, cigarette-smoking humanist, the man who wrote about time travel and Dresden and the strange species of Tralfamadorians. But in 1969, when Slaughterhouse-Five came out, he was not young, not new, and certainly not destined to succeed. He was forty-seven.

Why does this matter? Because we live in a culture obsessed with precocity. We valorize the twenty-two-year-old founder, the thirty-year-old Nobel laureate, the poet who dies before publishing her second book. To be forty-seven in America often feels like you are past your prime, coasting toward irrelevance. And yet Vonnegut’s story punctures this narrative. It raises the uncomfortable, thrilling question: how much can be done late, when everyone thinks the window has closed?