Preface in Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

Vonnegut wrote the Preface in Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales, a collection of short stories by Budd Schulberg published by Random House in 1989.

Summary

Budd Schulberg, c. 1954

In the early twentieth century, Americans had so much enthusiasm for stories in print that a new writer would view an established author only a few years older as a "literary ancestor". Thus did Budd Schulberg—born in 1914 and already having published What Makes Sammy Run? in 1941—appear to Vonnegut after the Second World War. Although the two are now friends, Schulberg still seems like a member of an older generation, although Schulberg probably doesn't look on him as a kid brother any more than Vonnegut looks on younger writers as such.

Print stories, however, are now in a steep decline as new technology broadcasts famous faces with special effects and appropriate music to every part of the globe, so that even the illiterate have access to more than enough stories. As such, people are increasingly losing the most profound form of meditation yet developed. The printing press was also "cold-bloodedly technical" like television, computers, and whatever else is to come next, but, purely by accident, books produce the required isolation and body state recommended by eastern meditation. Vonnegut still practices the eastern method occasionally—and finds life "sweeter" afterward—but as he's said elsewhere, it is much like "scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon". But the western method with books is not only refreshing but instructive, allowing the reader into the mind of another person.