AMERICAN novelist, essayist and humorist Kurt Vonnegut, whose most popular and enduring character was a fictional Bermudian science fiction author called Kilgore Trout, died in New York City yesterday as the result of injuries sustained in a recent fall. He was 84.Best known for such best selling novels as Breakfast of Champions<$Slaughterhouse-Five <$>and Galapagos, Vonnegut enjoyed a major vogue in the 1970s when his darkly comic books fired the imagination of the world and reflected the prevailing pessimism of the times.

Indianapolis-born Vonnegut was married to celebrated photographer Jill Krementz, daughter of long-time Bermuda residents Walter and Virginia Krementz of Paget.

Walter Krementz’s family established the Krementz Jewelry chain in the US. He died in 1992. Virginia Krementz, who died in 2005, ran her own fashion business out of a showroom in New York’s Wyndham Hotel, representing designers including Bermuda’s Polly Hornburg.

Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz were frequent visitors to her parents’ Bermuda home over the years.

“Jill basically grew up here in the 1950s,” said a Bermuda family friend. “And she and her husband Kurt Vonnegut have been to the island a number of times over the years, always in a very quiet, low-key way.”

His satirical works were modern-day parables in which absurdist humour and acid social commentary followed whatever unexpected directions Vonnegut’s unswerving ethical compass dictated.

The author’s books sold in the millions and tickled the American funny bone at the height of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the counter-cultural revolution in US society.

A World War Two veteran, Vonnegut’s nightmarish experiences as a Prisoner of War during the Allied fire-bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945 — when between 35,000 and 130,000 civilians, refugees and POWs were killed over three nights — inspired his most acclaimed and seag novel of human folly, Slaughterhouse-Five. This apocalyptic scenario, mankind’s propensity for self-destruction on an increasingly global scale, is a theme that features in six other Vonnegut novels and numerous essays.

The Bermudian-background of the character Kilgore Trout, a literary alter ego for Vonnegut, was introduced in the 1973 novBreakfast Of Champions<$>.

According to Vonnegut, Trout was born here in 1907 when his father was stationed on the island by the Royal Ornithological Society to protect the Bermuda Ern, a legendary sea eagle with a 15-foot wingspan long thought to have become extinct.

In a characteristic Vonnegut twist, the Bermuda Ern does indeed become extinct — after being exposed to athlete’s foot fungus carried to its Castle Harbour sanctuary by the Royal Ornithological Society expedition sent to protect the last remaining specimens.

Trout grows up to become an underappreciated science fiction writer whose obscure work nevertheless serves as a catalyst for the misadventures that befall major characters in the Vonnegut canon.

Kilgore Trout appears in>Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions<$>, <od Bless Your. Rosewater<$>, Jailbird<$> and<the author’s last novel Timequake, <$>referred to in Hocus Pocus <$>and the ghost of his son, Leon Trotsky Trout, narrates Vonnegut’s meation on evolution, Galapago<$>s.

“If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Vonnegut said in defence of his “recycling” of Kilgore Trout, “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

Recently Vonnegut killed Kilgore Trout off, reporting he committed suicide after consulting a psychic in the run-up to the 2000 US Presidential election who told him George W. Bush would win by a vote of 5-to-4 in the US Supreme Court.

The epitaph on his tombstone, said Vonnegut, reads: “Life is no way to treat an animal.”

Trout was portrayed by Albert Finney in the 1999 Bruce Willis film vion of Breakfast Of Champions<$>.

Author Vonnegut dies at the age of 84