Seventy-five years ago, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut was underground in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany, as fire rained down from the sky.

He had been fighting for the US Army in the Battle of the Bulge when he was captured by German soldiers and taken as a prisoner of war, and the Germans were using the slaughterhouse as a makeshift detention facility. Being in that meat locker saved his life; he was in there as US and British forces attacked the city in successive raids that left unimaginable destruction. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around," Vonnegut said later. "When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town down."

The artwork in the image above was created for an exhibition in Dresden five years ago, on the 70th anniversary of the event.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel he wrote many years later about the event, and the first book of his to become a bestseller, the big idea, though it's unstated in the book, is that an event like this would break any person's sanity. The protagonist of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, has "come unstuck in time," and has to re-experience everything he's been through, over and over.

The reader experiences his life events too, but not in order. For part of the book, Billy is an animal in a zoo on a planet called Tralfamadore. The aliens that live there, Tralfamadorians, do not have the concept of past, present, and future. They experience all time at once.

"The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti," Vonnegut writes. Meanwhile, Billy "is in a constant state of stage fright... because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next."

At one point, Vonnegut connects Billy's experience of time to literature itself: "What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

The literary almanac A Reader's Book of Days tells a condensed version of the novel's creation:

Held in Dresden as a German prisoner during the final convulsions of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the Allied firestorm that consumed the city beginning [on February 13, 1945]. For twenty years he tried to turn the experience into fiction—"I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT"—before arriving at the jumbled and fragmented form of Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that, amid its time travel and green spacemen, returns relentlessly to the inexplicable carnage of those days, echoed in the life of a time-traveling American prisoner who knows that "I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976," the anniversary of the bombing.

The character Billy Pilgrim may have died in 1976—which was still in the future when the book was published in 1969—but Vonnegut lived on for decades after that, as a justifiably famous writer from that point on.

One of the discombobulating achievements of this anti-war book is how funny it is. It centers around an event Vonnegut remembered as "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable," so it doesn't seem like it could be funny, but it is. It is full of sentences like "I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone" and "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

I didn't realize until reading Vonnegut's Wikipedia page that his mother died by suicide right before he went overseas to fight, and that he discovered her body (she overdosed on pills) when he came home to see her for Mother's Day. That can't have helped his mental state, and that was before everything that went down in Dresden. After the firebombing, he and the other prisoners of war were forced to pick through the ruins of the city and excavate corpses from the rubble, an activity he described as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt." Those bodies were then piled up and turned to ash by German soldiers with flamethrowers.

As funny and flashy as parts of the book are, it is the grim, quiet sentences that are most disturbing. "There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground" is a sentence that I have not been able to get out of my head for the last twenty years. Dresden was famous for manufacturing things like delicate china plates and teacups, and bone china is made from the ash of bones—just not usually human bones.

Another grim sentence: "Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."

In 2004, I flew to Spokane to see Vonnegut talk at a literary festival out there.

Vonnegut hobbled out onstage—he was 81—and gave a long, hilarious talk about President George W. Bush ("You know why he's so pissed at Arabs? They invented algebra"), the Vietnam war ("catastrophically idiotic"), corporate power ("Big money has disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution"), drugs ("I want to say something about the war on drugs, and that is, it's better than having no drugs at all"), America's two-party political system ("If you aren't one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut"), science ("First there was nothing, and then there was a big bang, and that's where all this crap came from"), and life in general ("All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being").

At the end of his talk, he got a standing ovation. A teenager in the lobby said afterward, "Now that was cool."

After that, there was a gathering of festival organizers and booksellers in a nearby bar, and Vonnegut dropped by, and I watched him make his way around the room obligatorily, thanking the people who had paid him to be there. I remember it like it was yesterday. I kept waiting for my chance to go up and say something to him, but I kept freezing up, intimidated, tongue-tied, and then my opportunity passed. I watched his back as he made his way out of the room, and right before he stepped through the door, he turned back to the room, smiled broadly, and flipped everyone off.