Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade

We present to readers the autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade by the famous American writer Kurt Vonnegut. After the events at Pearl Harbor, the future writer voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. armed forces and participated in World War II. Captured, he ended up in Dresden, where he experienced his most harrowing wartime ordeal. He witnessed the Allied bombing of Dresden and was one of only seven surviving American prisoners of war. At night, they were locked in the basement of Slaughterhouse-Five, where meat carcasses were stored. Miraculously escaping death from their own planes, the soldiers experienced the full horror of war as they cleared the rubble and pulled out tens of thousands of dead. The book includes the complete unadapted text of the novel, supplemented with commentary, exercises, and a glossary.