Gregory Sumner guides readers, with insight and passion, through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works. He gives readers a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success and individualism. Instead of a celebration of these values, readers share Vonnegut's outrage, his broken-hearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality.