Ahh, the glamorous life of an airline pilot. Flying to places like Key West (home of Hemingway), Nantucket, and the Bahamas. Long layovers in exotic locales like… Indianapolis.
Anywhere is fun if you like exploring, and if you’re a writer, exploring is what you’re always doing, even if the place you’re exploring isn’t a place that exists. Indianapolis, for whatever reason, keeps on existing, and since only boring people get bored, I walked the ten blocks from the hotel to the Kurt Vonnegut museum.
- Cost: $12 (as of July 2024, check here to see if it’s changed)
- Time to visit: based on the timestamps from the first picture I took while standing outside the museum to the one I took after walking out, I spent exactly 90 minutes. I took my time, read everything, and felt I saw everything there was to see. I linger in museums of all kinds and tend to take longer than almost everyone else, so you won’t need to block off an entire day for this one if I could do it in an hour and a half.
I like Vonnegut’s writing in general, but I like him even more as a thinker and as a human. The museum brings out the human side of a great humanist, but the flip side of that is that it’s relatively light on the literary analysis. Except, of course, for Slaughterhouse-Five. For his best-known work, the exhibit is absolutely stunning.
What’s that little banner at the upper left of the front of the museum say? This:
Like most museums, the gift shop is right up front. They had as quirky a selection of things as you’d expect from someone as unique as Kurt Vonnegut. I love the price tag on the Cat’s Cradle shirt, but I loved the typewriter one so much I bought it. You can get one at the online museum shop, too.
The museum has three floors. On the first floor are some Vonnegut artifacts, including his clarinet, one of his typewriters, and the text of a letter he wrote in protest to an idiot school board official who burned his books. (How far we haven’t come.)
This McCarthy-era poster deserves to stand alone:
The second floor is where things start to get really interesting. There is a writing center room with art either by or about Vonnegut, and the table covers are done in reproductions of newspaper articles about banned books.
This is not the only place with paintings/drawings by Vonnegut or about him. They are all throughout the museum.
To me, the highlight of the entire place, the thing that made the price of admission worth it alone, was the re-creation of his writing setup.
There were other tidbits from a wall that had a large biographical timeline. The one about Russian literature being part of his future wife’s dowry is humorous.
As happy as I was to see his writing setup, the third floor was what blew me away. The entire floor is dedicated almost entirely to Slaughterhouse-Five and had an impactful exhibit on Dresden and Vonnegut’s experience as a prisoner of war.
Vonnegut’s box of rejections is the beat-up red brick at the upper left of this picture:
Vonnegut himself never lost the sense of absurdity about how something that killed so many people made him so much money:
This piece of art below is called “Billy Pilgrim’s War Chest” and was made by David Lane and James Morgan. The scene at the top shows troops going into Dresden in search of survivors. The amount of devastation is, well, devastating. Vonnegut is the solitary figure in the red jacket.
On the way out, here is one of Vonnegut’s best known quips:
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