Vonnegut is also notable because he was one of the first modern science fiction authors to get serious attention in the literary world. Although your literature professors (and Vonnegut himself) may try to tell you he's not actually a science fiction writer, the aliens and time-travel seem to disagree.

Moral Guardians: Senator Rosewater. He's so proud that he managed to create a law that passed muster with the Supreme Court in defining obscenity. If it has pubic hair, it's not art, it's obscene. Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I’m temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father’s ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it. Don’t worry, I don’t hear voices. Interrupted Suicide: Fred Rosewater is about to hang himself, but he's stopped by a visit from Mushari. Idle Rich: What Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater (and a minor character in several other Vonnegut novels) wishes to avoid being, hence his esoteric humanitarian projects. The 'Verse: Vonnegut's stories and characters have a tendency to overlap with one another. If it's one of his fictional works, expect at least a cameo from Kilgore Trout and/or the Tralfamadorians.

Shut Up, Kirk!: One of Eliot's friends try to call Senator Rosewater out on his open contempt for the poor, saying that an elected politician should be polite to the people he hopes will vote for him. The Senator tells him that he has spoken his mind his entire career, and everyone votes for him anyway, including the poor - because even they secretly agree that contempt is all they deserve. The separation of corporate control and benefit opens the way for what Roman lawyers feared most: fraud. Who can say whether those in control, the corporate managers, are really doing their best for the beneficiaries? In fact what can 'best' mean when it is merely the superlative for an infinite number of quite different possible 'goods'? The opportunity for fraud is immense, and historically irresistible. This is the main theme of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: corporate fraud and how to combat it. It was hard to not think of that department, and of the rather upsetting current political climate, as I was reading “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”.

A full decade after his death, the editors of an omnibus of his work discovered five short stories from the early '50s (i.e., before any of his most famous work) that had never been published and put them in the book, first posting one online for free as a tease.Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a 1979 musical that marked the first collaboration of composer Alan Menken and writer Howard Ashman. Based on Kurt Vonnegut's 1965 novel of the same name, the musical tells the story of Eliot Rosewater, a millionaire who develops a social conscience and creates a foundation to improve the lives of the citizens of an impoverished Indiana town. Almighty Janitor: Mary Kathleen O'Looney is a bag lady who secretly runs the world's largest corporation. Norman Mushari, a recent hire at a DC law firm ( He had an enormous ass which was luminous when bare.), has begun plotting a violent overthrow of the Rosewater Foundation. How? By proving that the President of the Foundation, Eliot Rosewater, is a raving lunatic.