We Are What We Pretend to Be
Kurt Vonnegut
Vanguard Press
<p>Called "our finest black-humorist" by <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, <i>We Are What We Pretend To Be</i>.<p>Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey," <i>Basic Training</i> was never published in Vonnegut's lifetime. It appears to have been written in the late 1940s and is therefore Vonnegut's first ever novella. It is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley's only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General's deranged (but oh...