About This Book
Jailbird is Vonnegut's reckoning with American labor history — with the promises made to working people, the betrayals compounded over a century, and the quiet persistence of idealism in the face of those betrayals. Narrator Walter F. Starbuck, a mid-level Nixon aide who served time for Watergate, emerges into a changed America to wander, remember, and bear witness. Vonnegut's use of the Sacco and Vanzetti case as a moral lodestone gives the novel unusual weight. He was never more serious about politics than here, nor more careful about the distance between American ideals and American practice. Jailbird is underrated in the Vonnegut canon — a late-career achievement that rewards careful readers.
Jailbird sits alongside Hocus Pocus as Vonnegut's most politically pointed fiction, and readers wanting to trace his evolution should start with the early stories in Bagombo Snuff Box.