Friday, July 15, 2016

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

This spring, I was in Indianapolis and had the privilege of visiting the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. This place is fantastic. 

It is a little museum, jam-packed with artifacts from Vonnegut’s life (including at least some of his library, his purple heart, and the typewriter on which he wrote many of his novels). The best part was the curator who greeted me when I came in; he was clearly a passionate Vonnegut fan, and gave me an artifact-by-artifact personal tour of the exhibits. He brought to life the author, his life, and even his family, which I never knew much about. (He also told me that ice-nine was based on a real-life experiment, which is terrifying.)

The staff has a lot of love and respect for Vonnegut and his work, and an understanding of what him made him tick (or not tick). They hold events in honor not only of Vonnegut's humor (block parties with asterisk cookies) but also his sense of justice (banned book weeks). And they have been able to forge a close relationship with members of the Vonnegut family, which adds immeasurably to the richness of their programs and collections. 

The museum is currently raising money to move into a new building four times larger than the tiny space they are in now. It is scheduled to open in April 2017, so any Vonnegut fans visiting after that should be in for a treat. 

I do think it's funny that the library's website talks about the legacy of "Hoosier author" Kurt Vonnegut, since in Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut described the community of Hoosiers as a granfalloon.

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