Kurt Vonnegut’s Daily Routine

Today, November 11th, is, among other things, Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday.

Here, as described on page 202 of Charles Shields’s And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, was his daily routine for a time when he was living, teaching, and writing in Iowa City in the 1960s:

Up at 5:30 every morning, he wrote until eight, fixed breakfast in the apartment, returned to his writing for another two hours, then took a walk into town to run errands and swim at the gymnasuim. After lunch, he read his mail and prepared for the afternoon’s teaching. Nights in the apartment he cooked dinner, listened to jazz, or read, a glass of scotch at his side.

Vonnegut’s daily routine isn’t described in Mason Currey’s wonderful (apart from my quibbles with his organization) book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, and because it’s Vonnegut’s birthday and I’m into this kind of stuff, I’ve included it here.