In the first half of the 20th century, those persnickety New Critics referred to the analysis of authors’ personal lives in literary criticism as “a biographical fallacy.” And they were mostly right. But that was before Kurt Vonnegut and a gang of writers, such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, blew the house down and blurred the lines between the nonfictional world and their fictional characters.
Vonnegut gleefully injected himself into his stories, leaving readers to either mute the dissonance of his presence or to embrace his paradoxical persona as if he were riding shotgun with them.
