The Books Kurt Vonnegut Considered His Best—and Worst

In 1981, Kurt Vonnegut published Palm Sunday, a grab bag of speeches, essays, letters, and odds and ends that he subtitled An Autobiographical Collage, and partway through it he did something few novelists would risk in print: he gave himself a report card. Mental Floss has run the full list of grades before, in a piece about one of the two books at the top of it. The list alone doesn't show the rule he graded by or why one novel landed at the bottom, and it stops before he did.Comparing Himself With HimselfVonnegut set out the rules in a short preamble. "I have graded my separate works from A to D," he wrote. "The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself." That, he explained, was how he could give himself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle while knowing "that there was a writer named William Shakespeare." The list runs in order of publication, so readers could "plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like."First published in 1969, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' was one of only two works to receive an A-plus on Vonnegut's self-graded report card. | Bill Tompkins/GettyImagesThe rise came first. Player Piano, his 1952 debut, got a B. The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater each got an A, and Cat's Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) got the only two A-pluses. The fall came after that: a B-minus for the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, a C for Breakfast of Champions, and another C for the essay collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Jailbird, his newest novel, pulled him back up to an A in 1979, and Palm Sunday earned a C, meaning the book you were holding while you read the grades was graded below Player Piano.The D That StungTwo works got a D. One was his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and the other was Slapstick, the 1976 novel about a pair of giant, freakish twins who are geniuses together and dull apart. It was also the one he'd tied most closely to his own life: "This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography," its prologue begins, and the twins were modeled on Vonnegut and his sister Alice, who died of cancer in 1958.The critics hated it. Greil Marcus, reviewing it for Rolling Stone in October 1976, called the novel "cute, contrived, demeaning, devoid of real feeling," and the reviews in The New York Times and The Village Voice were just as rough. When WNYC's Walter James Miller sat down with Vonnegut that month, he invited the author to answer them. Five years later, Vonnegut more or less agreed with them on paper, though by Open Culture's account he later told Charlie Rose he'd been too hard on the book.After the Report CardThe grades stop at Palm Sunday, and Vonnegut kept going: Deadeye Dick in 1982, Galápagos in 1985, Bluebeard in 1987, Hocus Pocus in 1990, and Timequake , and none of them is on the list. The closest thing to a later verdict turned up in 1992, when the critic Michael Mason, reviewing Vonnegut's second collage, Fates Worse Than Death, for the London Review of Books, noted that the author had recently called Galápagos his "best book." Mason also went back to the old report card and the grade at the bottom of it: "D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it to yourself."Kurt Vonnegut later in his career. A decade after grading his bibliography, he reconsidered his own marks and named 1985's 'Galápagos' as his best book. | Douglas Elbinger/GettyImagesVonnegut read the review and sent the London Review of Books a two-sentence letter, which ran that August: "Only this morning did I read your essay (LRB, 26 March) about my work. For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold etc." The line he was quoting comes from the opening scene of Hamlet, and the part he left off with "etc." is "And I am sick at heart."Read More: