Slaughterhouse Number Five, or the Children's Crusade, or the Mandatory Dance with Death. Warsaw 1972, PIW, Edition I, pp. 180, form. 12.5 x 18.5, hardcover with wrapper, illustrations by Jerzy Jaworowski, autograph of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on pre-title page.
Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden in 1945, hidden in an underground meat storage freezer, and was later forced to work finding and burying the bodies of the dead. As he recalls in the opening chapter of the novel, Vonnegut had always wanted to describe his experiences there, but was unable to put them into words for more than twenty years. What he experienced and saw could not be put into the framework of a plot - hence the novel's surprisingly fragmented form, in which truth mixes with fantasy, and the present with the past and future.
