Kurt Vonnegut dies aged 84

US author Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his novels Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle has died. He was 84.

Vonnegut suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.

A self-described religious sceptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as his creations Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater to make his points of view.

He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, he drew a headstone with the epitaph: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.”

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during the Second World War, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people in the city.

“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write, what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in Fates Worse Than Death, his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground fridge labelled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel, in which Private Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-travelling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation.

“He was sort of like nobody else,” said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in Second World War.

“He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn’t go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style.

“Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.”

Vonnegut was born in 1922, in Indianapolis, a “fourth-generation German-American religious sceptic Freethinker,” and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.

When he returned, he worked on Chicago’s news bureau, and then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed.

He wrote his first novel, Player Piano, in 1951, followed by The Sirens of Titan, Canary in a Cat House and Mother Night, making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially Cat’s Cradle in 1963, in which scientists create “ice-nine,” a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity.

Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers’ aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific scepticism, made him its honorary president.

His characters tended to be miserable anti-heroes with little control over their fate.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with A Man Without a Country, a collection of his non-fiction, including jabs at the Bush administration.

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister’s three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in an plane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.