Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltered in an underground meat locker while the city above him burned. He spent the next twenty-three years trying to write about it and failing — until he produced Slaughterhouse-Five, the anti-war novel that told the truth about Dresden by admitting that the truth was impossible to tell. The book that made him famous was the one he spent two decades believing he could not write.

This episode traces Vonnegut from his Indianapolis childhood through the capture at the Battle of the Bulge, the Dresden firebombing, the decades of failed attempts to write about it, and the breakthrough novel that turned trauma into one of the defining works of American fiction.

• Vonnegut’s capture during the Battle of the Bulge and imprisonment in Dresden
• The firebombing survival in the underground meat locker and the corpse-mining that followed
• Twenty-three years of failed attempts to write the Dresden novel
• Slaughterhouse-Five — the unstuck-in-time structure that finally made the unspeakable speakable