Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy Pilgrim has lived an odd sort of life. He is a barber's son who gets drafted, then settles into a career as an optometrist, and eventually is carried off by aliens. Somewhere along the way he has come unstuck in time, drifting between moments of his past, present and future with no say in where he lands. One of those moments, the one he keeps returning to, is the night he survived as an American prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II.

Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden himself as a POW, and he said it took him twenty-three years to find a way to write about what he saw. Billy's time travel is where the two part ways. The novel that came out of that long struggle mixes war fiction, science fiction, memoir and satire, and it treats an unthinkable atrocity with a strange, sorrowful humor rather than with solemnity.

Published during the Vietnam War, the book became a bestseller and made Vonnegut a cult figure in American letters. Some schools and libraries banned or censored it over its language and violence, yet those same qualities, along with its political edge and its refusal to stay within one genre, are what drew so many later writers to it. It remains one of the best-known antiwar novels, and its portrait of disillusionment, trauma and postwar anxiety still lands with force today.