"Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Haverhill, Suffolk




For Benjamin D. Hitz,
Close friend of my youth,
Best man at my wedding.
Ben, you used to tell me about
Wonderful books you had just read,
And then I would imagine that I
Had read them, too.
You read nothing but the best, Ben,
While I studied chemistry.
Long time no see.




PROLOGUE




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Yes - Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside. That is no disgrace. A
lot of good people can't make it on the outside.

******

I received a letter this morning (November 16, 1978) from a young stranger named John Figler, of
Crown Point, Indiana. Crown Point is notorious for a jailbreak there by the bank robber John
Dillinger, during the depths of the Great Depression. Dillinger escaped by threatening his jailor
with a pistol made of soap and shoe polish. His jailor was a woman. God rest his soul, and her
soul, too. Dillinger was the Robin Hood of my early youth. He is buried near my parents - and near
my sister Alice, who admired him even more than I did - in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
Also in there, on the top of Crown Hill, the highest point in the tiny, is James Whitcomb Riley,
"The Hoosier Poet." When my mother was little, she knew Riley well.
Dillinger was summarily executed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was shot
down in a public place, although he was not trying to escape or resist arrest. So there is nothing
recent in my lack of respect for the F.B.I.
John Figler is a law-abiding high-school student. He says in his letter that he has read