40 Fun Facts About God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater opens by announcing that a leading character in the tale is what?

A sum of money gets top billing: the Rosewater fortune of more than $87 million. Nearly everyone in the story is defined by how they chase it, guard it or give it away.

2BR02B, a Kilgore Trout story named in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, takes its title from which Shakespeare play?

Hamlet supplies the pun: read aloud with the zero as 'naught', the title becomes the prince's most famous question. Vonnegut had used the same title for a 1962 short story of his own.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Eliot hallucinates a firestorm engulfing which city, Kurt Vonnegut's own birthplace?

Indianapolis burns in Eliot's mind just as his breakdown begins, and he spends the next year in a mental hospital. The vision borrows the wartime fate of a German city that Vonnegut himself lived through.

Which future Disney composer wrote the music for the 1979 stage musical of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Alan Menken wrote the score, his first collaboration with lyricist Howard Ashman. The show closed off-Broadway after 49 performances, but the pair went on to The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

Eliot Rosewater is haunted by wartime guilt after mistakenly killing Germans who turned out to be what?

Firefighters, not enemy soldiers, were his victims, one of them a boy of fourteen. Serving with a volunteer brigade back home is how Eliot tries to atone.

Which biblical phrase from the Sermon on the Mount serves as the subtitle of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Pearls Before Swine is the alternative title, a warning from Matthew's Gospel about offering precious things to those who will trample them. It suits a hero who lavishes love on people everyone else has written off.

Eliot Rosewater later shares a hospital room with which time-travelling hero of another Kurt Vonnegut novel?

Billy Pilgrim meets him on a psychiatric ward, where Eliot introduces him to the science fiction of Kilgore Trout. Those paperbacks colour everything Billy later says about aliens and time.

How does Eliot Rosewater finally defeat the lawsuit over the family fortune?

Eliot claims the children as his: dozens of Rosewater County women had named him as the father of their babies, so he acknowledges every one. A whole county now outranks his cousin in the line of inheritance.

At a performance of which opera does Eliot Rosewater shout advice to the lovers suffocating on stage?

Aida ends with its lovers sealed in a tomb, and Eliot calls out that their air would last longer if they stopped singing. The outburst is one of the episodes that convince people he is unwell.

Which Kurt Vonnegut novel, his breakthrough bestseller, was published next after God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Slaughterhouse-Five followed in 1969 and made Vonnegut famous. It picks up threads first spun here, including Eliot himself and the memory of a bombed German city.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Norman Mushari plots to seize the fortune by proving that Eliot is what?

Insane is the one finding that can strip Eliot of control of the Rosewater Foundation, so Mushari collects every odd thing he does. The fortune would then pass to a cousin Mushari hopes to fleece.

Eliot Rosewater's conservative father, Lister Ames Rosewater, holds which powerful office in Washington?

A US senator from the family's home state, he is appalled that his son gives love and cash to people he considers worthless. Their quarrel over who deserves help runs through the whole book.

The firestorm that Eliot Rosewater imagines draws on the wartime bombing of which German city, which Vonnegut survived?

Dresden was destroyed while Vonnegut, a prisoner of war, sheltered in a meat locker. The memory surfaces in this book before becoming the subject of his most famous one.

Fred Rosewater, the distant cousin who stands to inherit in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, earns his living how?

Selling insurance barely keeps Fred afloat, and he has no idea he is related to one of America's great fortunes. That makes him the perfect client for a schemer who wants a cut.

The songwriters of the 1979 Rosewater musical next wrote which off-Broadway hit based on a low-budget 1960 film?

Little Shop of Horrors opened in 1982 at the same small theatre where the Rosewater show began, then ran off-Broadway for five years. The Vonnegut musical had lasted only a few weeks.

The Rosewater Foundation, which Eliot uses to help the poor, was originally set up so the family could avoid what?

Paying taxes was the point: Eliot's father designed the foundation to keep the estate intact for his descendants. Eliot turns the dodge into real charity, to his father's horror.

Which Kurt Vonnegut novel, published in 1963, came immediately before God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

Cat's Cradle was reviewed in only four publications, while its successor drew notices in about two dozen. Vonnegut's following was growing from a cult into a crowd.

Eliot Rosewater's cultured wife in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater comes from which European capital?

Paris is home for Sylvia, whose continental polish never fits small-town life among her husband's needy clients. After five years of trying she breaks down and asks for a divorce.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Eliot's stock remedy for callers is aspirin taken with a glass of what?

Wine washes down the aspirin, the prescription Eliot gives over the phone along with small cash gifts and an invitation to call again at any hour.

Kilgore Trout, who debuts in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, was modelled on which real science fiction author?

Theodore Sturgeon was a Cape Cod friend of Vonnegut's, and the joke is one fish name swapped for another. Vonnegut only confirmed the link after the older writer died in 1985.

Samaritrophia, the illness a doctor diagnoses in Eliot Rosewater's wife, is the collapse of which human quality?

Compassion simply switches off: the doctor coins the word for a conscience so overworked that other people's troubles stop registering. It strikes after years of helping Eliot tend his needy callers.

Fred Rosewater and his family live in the fictional seaside town of Pisquontuit, located in which New England state?

Rhode Island is home to the forgotten branch of the family, which is why Mushari heads there to recruit Fred. He also calls at a grand mansion in Newport.

Kurt Vonnegut based Eliot Rosewater on a Cape Cod man he knew who consoled troubled clients in which profession?

Accountant was the real man's trade: he specialised in clients who were in trouble and often had to cheer them up. Vonnegut turned that patience into a millionaire's calling.

Diana Moon Glampers, a client of Eliot Rosewater, shares her name with a character in which Vonnegut short story?

Harrison Bergeron gives the name to the Handicapper General, a shotgun-wielding enforcer of equality. The lonely woman who phones Eliot for reassurance could hardly be less like her.

Eliot Rosewater reappears in which 1973 Kurt Vonnegut book that sends Kilgore Trout to a Midwestern arts festival?

Breakfast of Champions brings back both men, and near its end Vonnegut himself steps into the story to set Trout free.

The Rosie, an annual prize named after Eliot Rosewater and voted on by Indiana teenagers, honours what?

A young adult book wins each year, chosen by high school students across Vonnegut's home state. Its full name is the Eliot Rosewater Indiana High School Book Award.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, struggling novelist Kilgore Trout pays his bills by working as a clerk where?

A trading stamp center employs Trout as a stock clerk, handling the merchandise that shoppers claimed with their saved-up stamps. Eliot calls him the greatest prophet of the age.

In his 1981 collection Palm Sunday, which grade did Kurt Vonnegut award God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

A was his verdict, the same mark he gave The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night. He was far harsher on later work, handing a D to Happy Birthday, Wanda June.

Which author turned Venus on the Half-Shell, a Kilgore Trout title from the Rosewater novel, into a real 1975 book?

Philip José Farmer wrote it under Trout's name with Vonnegut's reluctant blessing. So many readers assumed Vonnegut was the author that he came to regret saying yes.

By the end of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Eliot's former wife has gone to live where?

A Belgian nunnery takes her in, one whose sisters keep a rule of silence. It is the last the reader hears of a woman who loved Eliot deeply but could not share his mission.

Which bottled spirit is the regular tipple of the hard-drinking Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut's novel?

Southern Comfort fuels Eliot through his days beside the office telephone. Vonnegut draws his saint as puffy, balding and rarely washed, a former athlete gone to seed.

In the town of Rosewater, Eliot runs the Rosewater Foundation from a shabby office in which location?

Above a lunchroom and a liquor store, in a narrow attic, sits the office of one of America's richest men. His notices in phone booths urge the desperate to call him there.

Norman Mushari, the villain of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, studied law at which university that Vonnegut attended?

Cornell gave Mushari his law degree and was Vonnegut's own university, which the author left without graduating to join the army.

Norman Mushari visits the mansion of which wealthy family, also central to The Sirens of Titan, in the Rosewater novel?

The Rumfoords are Vonnegut's stock patrician clan, and Mushari calls on Lance Rumfoord at the family mansion. An earlier Rumfoord flew his own private spaceship.

Norman Mushari Jr., apparently the son of the Rosewater schemer, turns up in which later Kurt Vonnegut novel?

Slapstick hands the son the family business: like his father, he talks a client into suing her own relatives and counts on a fat share of the winnings.

Which Rosewater County woman, mother of twins named Foxcroft and Melody, is first to name Eliot as their father?

Mary Moody starts the rush, and dozens of other women follow with stories of their own. The lie that was meant to ruin Eliot ends up handing him his way out.

New Ambrosia, the failed utopia in Rosewater County's past, is modelled on which real American utopian settlement?

New Harmony was bought in 1825 by the reformer Robert Owen for a utopian experiment that collapsed within a few years. Vonnegut's version stands for every American dream that went sour.

In a Kilgore Trout story that Eliot Rosewater loves, Ethical Suicide Parlors stand beside which restaurant chain?

Howard Johnson's gets a grim new neighbour in Trout's overcrowded future, where machines do all the work and citizens are urged to volunteer for death.

Besides a county and a town, the Rosewater family name in Kurt Vonnegut's novel is attached to which local product?

Beer carries the name in full as Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer, and Eliot drinks plenty of it between telephone calls.

Eliot Rosewater wanders into a real science fiction writers' conference then held each year in which Pennsylvania town?

Milford hosted the conference founded in the 1950s by Damon Knight and Judith Merril, among others. Eliot tells the assembled writers that they alone are facing up to what really matters.