Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut, following the life of Billy Pilgrim from his early years through his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during the Second World War to the post-war years, as Billy frequently travels back and forth through time in a temporal crisis resulting from post-war psychological trauma. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience Vonnegut endured as an American serviceman, and the novel has been called an example of unmatched moral clarity and one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time. It has been translated into at least eleven other languages including German, Italian, French, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Chinese.