Happy Birthday, Wanda June - by Kurt Vonnegut (Paperback)

About the Book

At the center of Kurt Vonnegut's first play, which premiered in New York in 1970 and was then adapted into a film in 1971, is big-game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan. For eight years, he has been presumed dead, lost in the Amazon Rain Forest while hunting for diamonds. Now he's back, only to find his wife engaged to a hippie doctor and his son transformed into a pampered sissy. Though his hunting trophies remain, an inexplicable birthday cake sits in the living room bearing a strange icing inscription: Happy Birthday, Wanda June. Can the household bear the returning force of Harold's machismo? And who on earth is Wanda June?

Book Synopsis

"Richly and often pertinently funny [with] a sure instinct for the carefully considered irrelevance . . . a great deal of incidental hilarity [and] inspired idiocy."--The New York Times

Happy Birthday Wanda June was Kurt Vonnegut's first play, which premiered in New York in 1970 and was then adapted into a film in 1971. It is a darkly humorous and searing examination of the excesses of capitalism, patriotism, toxic masculinity, and American culture in the post-Vietnam War era. Featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from the original stage production, this play captures Vonnegut's brilliantly distinct perspective unlike we have ever seen it before.

"A great artist."--The Cincinnati Enquirer

About the Author

Kurt Vonnegut's humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" (The New York Times) with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers." Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.