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60 free Kurt Vonnegut trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Kurt Vonnegut trivia quiz covers the life and books of the American satirist who survived the firebombing of Dresden in a meat locker and turned it, twenty-four years later, into Slaughterhouse-Five. It starts with his Indianapolis family of architects and brewers, his clarinet-playing school days, the biochemistry degree he never finished at Cornell and his capture during the Battle of the Bulge. It follows him through General Electric, a bankrupt Saab dealership, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the fame that arrived in 1969. The bulk of the questions are about the novels and stories themselves: Player Piano and the Shah of Bratpuhr, the chrono-synclastic infundibulum of The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night's double agent, Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General, ice-nine and Bokononism, Eliot Rosewater, Billy Pilgrim and Tralfamadore, Dwayne Hoover and Midland City, Slapstick's artificial extended families, Jailbird, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus and Timequake, plus Kilgore Trout, the fish-named alter ego who wanders through so many of them. The 1972 film, the Supreme Court book-ban case, the asteroid and the museum round it off. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on Vonnegut and his individual works, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for book clubs, English students and anyone who has ever written 'so it goes' in a margin.
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Q 01In which city was Kurt Vonnegut born and raised?
Indianapolis
His father and grandfather were architects there, and his mother's family fortune came from a brewery closed by Prohibition.
Q 02On what date was Vonnegut born?
11 November 1922
Armistice Day, which he later noted; his protagonist Billy Pilgrim shares his birth year.
Q 03What was the profession of Vonnegut's father and grandfather?
Architects
His great-grandfather Clemens founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company; the family firm designed Indianapolis's Athenaeum.
Q 04Whom did Vonnegut credit with raising him and giving him his values during his first decade?
Ida Young, the family's cook and housekeeper
He said the compassionate, forgiving side of his beliefs came from her.
Q 05Which instrument did Vonnegut play in his high-school band?
Clarinet
At Shortridge High he also co-edited the Tuesday edition of the school paper with Madelyn Pugh, later a writer for I Love Lucy.
Q 06What did Vonnegut major in at Cornell, at the urging of his father and brother?
Biochemistry
He wanted the humanities but was told to study something 'useful'; he was indifferent and ended up on academic probation.
Q 07In which German offensive of December 1944 was Vonnegut captured?
The Battle of the Bulge
He was an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division and was taken on 22 December with about 50 other soldiers.
Q 08Where did Vonnegut shelter during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945?
A meat locker three storeys underground
'When we came up the city was gone,' he said; the prisoners were then set to digging bodies from the rubble.
Q 09What did the factory where Vonnegut worked as a prisoner in Dresden produce?
Malt syrup for pregnant women
He called Dresden the 'first fancy city' he had ever seen.
Q 10How did Vonnegut describe the Purple Heart he received?
'My country's second-lowest decoration ... for frost-bite'
After repatriation he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers.
Q 11What subject did Vonnegut study at the University of Chicago after the war?
Anthropology
His thesis ideas were all rejected; 25 years later the university accepted one of his novels in lieu of a thesis.
Q 12Which of his novels did the University of Chicago eventually accept in place of a master's thesis?
Cat's Cradle
One of his rejected thesis topics had been about the shapes of stories, an idea he later turned into a famous lecture.
Q 13For which company did Vonnegut work as a publicist in Schenectady before writing full time?
General Electric
His brother Bernard worked there on silver-iodide cloud seeding, which fed into his fiction; he quit on 1 January 1951 and moved to Cape Cod.
Q 21In Mother Night, what is Howard W. Campbell Jr.'s secret role while broadcasting Nazi propaganda?
Double agent for the US Office of Strategic Services
After the war the agency refuses to clear him and he ends up in an Israeli cell block near Adolf Eichmann.
Q 22Which line did Vonnegut write in a foreword to Mother Night as its moral?
'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.'
Critic Lawrence Berkove compared its impersonator carried away by his role to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
Q 23In which year is the short story 'Harrison Bergeron' set?
Q 14How much did Collier's pay Vonnegut for his first published story, 'Report on the Barnhouse Effect', in 1950?
$750
The story concerned a scientist afraid his invention would become a weapon, echoing his brother's fears about cloud seeding.
Q 15What was the title of Vonnegut's first novel, published in 1952?
Player Piano
Set in a company much like GE, it satirised automation; Bantam reissued it as Utopia 14, cementing his sci-fi label.
Q 16In his first novel, what question does the Shah of Bratpuhr put to the supercomputer EPICAC?
'What are people for?'
He gets no answer and dismisses the machine as a 'false god'; the outsider-visitor device recurs throughout Vonnegut's books.
Q 17What business did Vonnegut and a partner open on Cape Cod in 1957 that went bankrupt within the year?
A Saab car dealership
He also designed a World War II board game called GHQ that no publisher would buy.
Q 18After his sister Alice died of cancer in 1958, what did Vonnegut and his wife do?
Took in three of her young sons
Her husband had been killed in a train accident two days earlier; the novel Slapstick later meditated on their sibling bond.
Q 19In The Sirens of Titan, how often does the time-warped Winston Niles Rumfoord materialise on Earth?
Every 59 days
His ship entered a 'chrono-synclastic infundibulum'; the character was modelled physically on Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Q 20According to The Sirens of Titan, what is the Kremlin really?
A coded message to a stranded alien ship
Human history has been manipulated by robotic aliens who need a replacement part only an advanced civilisation can make.
2081
Constitutional amendments have made everyone equal, so the beautiful wear masks and the clever wear radios that scramble their thoughts.
Q 24What is the title of the official who shoots Harrison Bergeron dead on live television?
Handicapper General
Diana Moon Glampers holds the post; Vonnegut reused her name for a character in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
Q 25On which fictional Caribbean island does the second half of his 1963 atomic-bomb novel unfold?
San Lorenzo
There the narrator discovers Bokononism, a religion built on harmless untruths, or 'foma'.
Q 26What is 'ice-nine' in the same 1963 novel?
Water that stays solid at room temperature and freezes any water it touches
Its inventor Felix Hoenikker was modelled on Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut's boss at GE.
Q 27On whom did Vonnegut base Felix Hoenikker, the fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb?
Irving Langmuir
Langmuir was the Nobel-winning head of the GE Research Lab where Bernard Vonnegut worked.
Q 28How does Eliot Rosewater, the rich senator's son in the 1964 novel, atone for a wartime killing?
Serving in a volunteer fire department and giving money away
The character was based on an accountant Vonnegut knew on Cape Cod who specialised in clients in trouble.
Q 29Which teaching post in the mid-1960s did Vonnegut liken to 'the rescue of a drowning man'?
The Iowa Writers' Workshop
He was broke and out of print; a Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1967 and took him back to Dresden.
Q 30What is the full title of the 1969 novel that made Vonnegut famous?
Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
He promised Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife, that he would call it The Children's Crusade and not glorify the 'babies' who fought.