Happy 100th birthday, Kurt Vonnegut!

"His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before," wrote Lev Grossman in 2007. Vonnegut was a biochemistry major at Cornell before dropping out and enlisting in the army in 1943; after he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to a prison camp in Dresden. He was there when it was bombed by Allied forces and survived by sheltering in a meat locker in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5-Slaughterhouse-Five. "On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden-possibly the world's most beautiful city," Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."