It’s the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922-2007), author of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), considered by many to be one of the greatest English language novels of all time. Slaughterhouse-Five—part autobiography, part historical fiction, part science fiction, and (according to Salman Rushdie) “a great realist novel”—is based on Vonnegut’s experience of the bombing of Dresden as a young POW in WWII.

If you think you haven’t read any Vonnegut, you’re wrong: nearly every high schooler in the country reads his story, “Harrison Bergeron,” about a dystopian society that enforces “equality laws.”

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to a well-to-do family: his father was an architect and his mother’s family was wealthy from their brewery. Then during the Great Depression, they fell on Hard Times; his father was often out of work, and Prohibition was hard on people with breweries. His mother struggled with mental illness, and on Mother’s Day in 1944, Vonnegut returned home from military training to find that she had killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. He was shipped off to Europe three months later.

Vonnegut was in the Battle of the Bulge before being captured and sent to a POW camp near Dresden. He and other POWs were working in an underground meat locker when Allied forces started bombing the city; the meat locker saved their lives.

Vonnegut returned home and married Jane Marie Cox, whom he’d met in kindergarten and with whom he had three children. He worked in advertising (hated it) and in 1952 published his first novel, Player Piano, a dystopian novel about the dangers of automation. Several years later, sister died of cancer two days after his brother-in-law was killed in a commuter train crash, so Vonnegut adopted his sister’s three children. He was desperate to make more money and continued writing, publishing The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963)—which originally sold only about 500 copies—and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). It was Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969 that cemented his reputation as a Big Hairy Deal.

Then Vonnegut went through a severe depression and swore off novel writing for a few years. Bad things happened: in 1971, Vonnegut and his first wife divorced painfully; that same decade Vonnegut’s son had a mental breakdown. In 1984, Vonnegut himself attempted suicide with pills and alcohol. Vonnegut did remarry in 1979 and with his second wife adopted a daughter; this marriage lasted for the remainder of his life. The last of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels, Timequake, was published in 1997, and his last book, a collection of biographical essays called A Man Without a Country, came out in 2005 and was a bestseller. Vonnegut died at 84 after a fall at his house in Manhattan.

Vonnegut loved Mark Twain and shared both his humor and his pessimism.

Have a suspenseful Monday waiting for that first big snowstorm and stay scrupulously honest to the data.