The author of a new biography of Kurt Vonnegut talking about his life and novels December 5, 2011

Greg Sumner is a Kurt Vonnegut expert and enthusiast, historian and author of the new book, Unstuck in Time, a celebration of the life and work of Vonnegut as an American literary grandmaster. Greg will be at Book Passage in San Francisco on December 5th to discuss how Vonnegut's life inspired some of his most beloved novels.

Unstuck in Time is a portrait of the quintessential American writer as seen through the lens of his most important work. In Unstuck in Time (Seven Stories Press, November 11, 2011), Gregory Sumner guides us through Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, from Player Piano (1952) to Timequake (1997) and including an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the writer's profound engagement with the American Dream in its various forms.



His books, written under dramatically changing personal circumstances and against the backdrop of seismic shifts in our country’s history, read together as a kind of diary, the entries of which Sumner here lays out with great passion and insight.

Greg Sumner has been a professor of history at University of Detroit Mercy since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle.

"Sumner does well to contextualize contemporary events both in the world and the writer's personal life during each novel's conception, ultimately connecting many dots in the Vonnegut oeuvre."
--Publisher's Weekly