“For a writer to become an icon takes time, and 84 years is more than enough. Memorializers the day after spoke of Vonnegut’s send-up in novel after novel of America’s obsession with technology, materialism and power, his creative mentoring of younger ’60s rebels, his evolution as a genre-busting, original comic voice (though Vonnegut traced his style in that department to Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton).”