Basic Training

Publisher Marketing: Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey," this 20,000-word novella was never published in Vonnegut s lifetime. It appears (from the address on the manuscript, a suburb of Schenectady, New York, and from the style and slant) to have been written in the late 1940s. Vonnegut was working at that time in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting. He was trying to sell to the so-called slick magazines of the time, like "The Saturday Evening Post" and "Collier s," while resisting the lure of science fiction a tension throughout his professional career. "Basic Training" is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood, and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General s deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its thirtyish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines advertisers were pitching their products. Another unexpected writer s influence underlies this story: J. D. Salinger. Throughout the 40s and before his move to New York, Salinger had produced short stories whose confused or slightly deranged young protagonists (most of them around the age of Haley Brandon) stumbled through pre- and postwar Manhattan and military service, experiencing mild disaffection, alienation, and then terrible anger. All of them came to learn that the people who ran the show were as crazy and dangerous as those nominally on the other side. Shortly after these semi-whimsical social portraits were published, Salinger, like Vonnegut, was drafted, shipped into combat and involved in the Battle of the Bulge. In this audio edition, performed for the first time by Colin Hanks ("Band of Brothers," "Orange County"), exist not only Vonnegut s influences and what later became his voice but Vonnegut s grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing; the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert." Contributor Bio:  Vonnegut, Kurt Kurt Vonnegut was an American science fiction and humour writer. Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Vonnegut studied chemistry in University while serving as an editor of his school's newspaper. The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted his post-secondary education, and Vonnegut served as a mechanical engineer in the army. Vonnegut's war experience, particularly his survival of the firebombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker in a building called "Slaughterhouse Five," vastly influenced his later writing, as well as his turn to pacifism and humanism. His most famous works include Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84.