Kurt Vonnegut came home from World War II intending to write a novel about the horrors he had witnessed during the firebombing of Dresden. It took him 23 years and countless drafts to produce Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that made him a literary sensation. I thought this book would be an exploration of that effort, but that’s not what it is. Roston casts about for a while between chronicling Vonnegut’s life and service in the war, summarizing the plot, and speaking to scholars about the novel […]