Orchard. Orchard School, Indianapolis IN, 1928-1936.

Shortridge. Shortridge High School School, Indianapolis IN, 1936-1940.

Cornell. Attended Cornell University, 1940-1942.

Carnegie Tech. Now Carnegie-Mellon University, 1943.

Tennessee. University of Tennessee., 1943.

Chicago. Attended University of Chicago, 1945-47. M.A., 1971.

1947. Between 1945 and 1947 Vonnegut drafted and proposed three different M.A. theses, including one comparing Cubist painters and the American Indian Ghost Dance movement. His last proposal, Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected unanimously by the anthropology department.

Vonnegut: ''I left Chicago without writing a dissertation - and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a P.R. man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat's Cradle to the Antropology Department, and they had said it was hal-way decent antropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I'm class of 1972 or so.''

Paris Review, Spring, 1979; quoted in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 182.

Related Vonnegutia

In a 1987 interview with Hank Nuwer (South Carolina Review, 19.2) Vonnegut is asked, in reference to his nearly flunking out of Cornell, ''Did you or your family at that time think it was disgraceful that you were having academic problems?'' Vonnegut responds, ''I think their [my parent's ] feelings about it - as I was very close to being thrown out and would have been thrown out for academic reasons because I had no gift for science really, and that's what I was in - was they would have said, 'That's it.' But I myself wanted to be a journalist and wondered if I wanted to go to college at all.... The problem was I didn't look old enough to be a very effective reporter. But you didn't need a college education to get a job, not even a good job in those days, so there wasn't much of a risk then.''

Quoted in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 246.

Does anyone else find it strange that Vonnegut's books are littered with Cornell grads but there is scant mention of alumni from Carnegie, Tennessee or Chicago? Aside from a swipe at the University of Chicago's swap of football for Bomb research in Timequake is there any other mention of Vonnegut's other colleges?