United States:American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark, satirical vision in works including Slaughterhouse-Fiveand Cat's Cradlewas shaped by the horrors he witnessed during the second World War, has died aged 84.
Vonnegut died on Wednesday after suffering brain injuries following a fall weeks ago, said Donald Farber, his friend, lawyer, agent and manager.
Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction, but his 14 novels were classics of the American counterculture, resonating with US antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam era.
The author's website, updated after his death, displayed a simple black-and-white image of a bird cage - a symbolic element in his writing - empty with an open door. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007", the page read.
"He was a beautiful man," Mr Farber said. "I never hung up the phone without having laughed. He always left me laughing, no matter what the circumstances of the world . . . I last spoke to him the day he fell. He was in good spirits."
Despite battles with severe depression, Vonnegut was known for his witticisms.
"I've had a hell of a good time," Vonnegut once wrote.
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different."
A defining event in Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Force in 1945, which he witnessed as a young prisoner of war. The bombing killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.
Dresden was the basis for Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval.
Vonnegut became a cult hero when the novel reached No 1 on bestseller lists. He became even more popular among many young Americans when some schools and libraries banned it for its sexual content, rough language and depictions of violence.
The novel featured a signature Vonnegut phrase, "so it goes", which became a catch phrase for Vietnam war opponents.
After the book was published, Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol. His mother had herself committed suicide.
Vonnegut mixed fiction and autobiography in his work, which also blended elements of science fiction and touched on authoritarianism and the dehumanisation of man by technology.
Fellow writers and academics lined up to praise his work yesterday.
Gore Vidal said Vonnegut was exceptionally imaginative among a post-war generation of writers that did not go in for that. "Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Norman Mailer hailed Vonnegut as "a marvellous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own". He said: "I would salute him as our own Mark Twain."
Tom Wolfe told the Los Angeles Timesthat Vonnegut "could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite remarkable".
In a novel published in 1974, Vonnegut himself wrote: "When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on.
"Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again.
"This moment and every moment lasts forever."
- (Reuters, Guardian service, LA Times)