Dan Wakefield, a friend to the late writer, contemplates why his work continues to attract young readers:
Few writers are able — or willing — to take on the most serious issues (e.g. the end of the world) and
write about them with humor as well as insight. Puzzling over the “big issues” is part of a young person’s coming of age, and young people not only find in Vonnegut a humorous and satirical approach that they find congenial, they also discover a refusal to shirk from the dark side of human nature. Memorializing the death of children killed in war in Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s orator says “… we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”
As young people come of age they are discovering that, as Vonnegut says, the truth is often shocking “because we hear it so seldom.” Vonnegut is a truth-teller, the one who points out the elephant in the room, the one who speaks the unspeakable, expressing the thought that we may be too timid to say ourselves. When Kurt and I and our publisher, Sam Lawrence, were invited to visit one of the first communes, back in the late sixties, the young man who founded it explained that he and his friends were learning to “live off the land” because “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut asked him, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?”
The Dish 