About This Book
A collection of Vonnegut's early short fiction, mostly published in popular magazines like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post in the 1950s. These are the stories that paid the bills while he developed his singular voice, and the craftsmanship is evident throughout — tight plotting, warm characters, and deceptively simple prose. What's striking is how fully-formed Vonnegut's humanism already was. The themes he'd return to for the rest of his career are all here in embryonic form. The title story alone, about a man returning to impress his first love, is a small masterpiece of bittersweet comedy.
These early stories reveal the seeds of the mature Vonnegut who would write Hocus Pocus and Jailbird—the dark humor, the humanist rage, the compassion for ordinary people caught in systems they cannot understand.