Kurt Vonnegut was an American author best known for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1922 and emerged as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s. He is known for his satirical literary style, as well as the science-fiction elements in much of his work.
While reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s papers in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, as they worked on the first comprehensive edition of his short fiction, Vonnegut’s friend Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, a scholar of Vonnegut’s work, came across five previously unpublished stories. Klinkowitz dates one of those five stories The Drone King, to the early 1950s, when Vonnegut hadn’t yet written a novel and was only beginning to publish short fiction.
Atlantic Studios, the video team at The Atlantic magazine published an animated excerpt of this never-before-seen Kurt Vonnegut short story. Caitlin Cadieux has designed, animated and directed the short with voice acting by Salvatore Vecchio.