Kurt Vonnegut

American novelist and humanist whose Slaughterhouse-Five — based on his experience surviving the Dresden firebombing as a POW — combined science fiction with anti-war satire and an unflinching examination of time, free will, and mass death.

Created Slaughterhouse-Five as the most emotionally devastating anti-war novel in American literature — using the Tralfamadorian device (seeing all moments in time simultaneously) to process trauma without sentimentality — and his 'So it goes' catchphrase became the most concise expression of dark equanimity in the face of death.