In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano(1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms.
Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and "winners" over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality—something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.”
