A Dream of Inequality Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is not only the only American who survived the firebombing of Dreseden by British and American planes at the end of World War II. He is also one of the few people from any country that survived. For ten days and nights bombers dropped phosphorous bombs on the German city. Temperatures exceeded 2000 C°. Ordinary civilians in bomb shelters were turned into ashes. Vonnegut was under the ground in …showed first 75 words of 646 total…

…showed last 75 words of 646 total…just before Vonnegut’s story was published (in 1961). It would be natural to imagine that Vonnegut and the others mentioned here were reacting to the democratic excesses of post-war society in America. It is the present writer’s opinion, however, that what really caused fear and disgust among imaginative writers at that time was the horrific nature of Soviet society about which Americans and Western Europeans (including former Communist supporters) were just beginning to learn.