LitCity

In a video interview with Andre Dubus III, he speaks briefly of living with his father, Andre Dubus, neighbors to Kurt Vonnegut: 

We lived in Iowa City and I taught two freshman rhetoric classes four mornings a week, then came home to eat lunch and write. I wrote in my den at the front of the house, a small room with large windows, and I looked out across the lawn at an intersection of streets shaded by tall trees. I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O’Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built. … Kurt Vonnegut was our neighbor. We had adjacent lawns; he lived behind us, at the top of the hill. One day that summer he was outside on his lawn or on his front porch four times when I was outside, and we waved and called to each other. The first time I was walking home from teaching, wearing slacks and a shirt; the next time I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt I had put on to write; then I wore gym shorts without a shirt and drove to the track; in late afternoon wearing another pair of slacks and another shirt, I walked up to his house to drink. He was sitting on his front porch and, as I approached, he said: ‘Andre, you changed clothes more than a Barbie doll.' Kurt did not have a telephone. That summer the English Department hosted a conference, and one afternoon a man from the department called me (to pick up) Mrs. Ellison at the train. She did not like to fly. I went up to Kurt’s house, and he came to the back door. I said: ‘They want us to pick up Ellison at the airport. Then his wife at the train.' He said ‘Swell. I’ll drive.’

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Godwin arrives in Iowa City to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, taught by Kurt Vonnegut and José Donoso, building friendships with Jane Barnes, John Casey, David Plimpton, and John Irving, Gail Godwin finally achieves her dream—and a published novelist is born.

Godwin describes class with Vonnegut in her memoir Publishing: A Writers Memoir.:

“In [Vonnegut’s] workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier. In May 1967 he would leave Iowa on a Guggenheim grant to do research in Dresden for Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel in progress, but all that spring I chugged along in creative bliss. A writer I had admired had given me the go-ahead. I wrote into the late night and early morning in my Iowa City rooms across the street from the jail...”

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Kurt Vonnegut's workshop was very popular and well attended. From it, many notable authors emerged such as John Irving ('The World According to Garp'), Gail Godwin ('The Old Woman'), John Casey ('An American Romance'), Nick Meyer ('The Seven Percent Solution').

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The Kurt Vonnegut plaque on the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk reads: 'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.'

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An original Vonnegut painting hangs in Jim McPherson’s office at the Workshop; in the inscription, Vonnegut calls Iowa City his “spiritual home.”

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Robert Lacy remembers his time in Iowa, with Richard Yates, Paul Engle, Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus

We did a great deal of partying in those years. It seems to have been a partying era. And one of the places we partied most often was the little white frame house on Brown Street, not far from the campus, where Andre Dubus lived with his wife, Pat, and their four kids. Andre had resigned his commissions as a captain in the Marines to come to Iowa and study writing. He and Pat were on welfare and received government-surplus food such as cheese and rice and peanut butter. Their house had a big kitchen with a wooden picnic table in it that served as the dining table. We would gather around that table, drinking and talking and snacking on government cheese. Verlin Cassill and Kurt Vonnegut and sometimes even Paul Engle, the Iowa workshop’s founder and director, used to appear at these parties -- Engle once arriving with a mixed case of gin and whisky he’d purchased with workshop money from the state-run liquor store on the other side of town. Yates could often be found asleep on the couch in Dubus’s front room. He would have spent the afternoon drinking alone at the Airliner and would be using the Dubuses’ sofa to sleep it off.

 

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During his time in Iowa City, Kurt Vonnegut lived at 800 North Van Buren St. -- a Victorian brick mansion in the tree-lined Brown Street neighborhood of northside Iowa City. In this house, Vonnegut began his work on Slaughterhouse-Five. Of one party at the house, in honor of Saul Bellow, Maria Pilar Donoso wrote:

For this celebration in honor of such a distinguished writer, the guests would be a mix, not only professors but also students in Kurt's classes, close friends, and the most talented participants in other classes or workshops. Thus, there were also whiskey, scotch or bourbon, so well liked by Americans, and gin and vermouth for dry martinis, fashionable drinks at that time. The Vonnegut house, shared with Eddie and Nannie, their teenage daughters, was not particularly elegant but it was spacious and warm, especially that night with the hidden, lighted fireplace in the great living room filled with lights and animated conversations. It seemed almost beautiful. Outside, light snow was falling, sprinkling the windows with white flakes....At the party Kurt assumed the assigned role of the host. He would mix and serve drinks in the living room corner, achieving control of his shyness in that way, that shyness that's always with him; in front of the typewriter, in front of his friends and students, and at the bar in his house, with a straight drink of whiskey that he'd drink as if it were a prescribed medicine. […] Although Vonnegut is a very timid human being, the night of Saul Bellow's party he was quite relaxed and animated. Perhaps this was because the guests were professors and students, everyday characters, who freed him of the tensions produced by meeting new people.

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Kurt Vonnegut is pictured here (closest to camera) on page 58 of the University of Iowa Hawkeye 1996 yearbook, teaching a fiction workshop. The caption reads: "Many [Iowa Writers' Workshop] courses were held in the incongruous surroundings of the chemistry auditorium."

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