And so it goes. Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. passed away April 12 of brain injuries resulting from an accidental fall. The 84-year-old absurdist would have relished this irony. Author of such classic novels as “Player Piano,” “Cat’s Cradle,” “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Breakfast of Champions,” Vonnegut billed himself as “a bum science fiction writer” like his alter ego Kilgore Trout. Actually, he was the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Vonnegut became a countercultural icon because his books spoke directly to high school and college students. He believed young people were not socialized enough to ignore our country’s grotesque incongruities. But despite his obsession with history and politics, Vonnegut remains a very autobiographical writer. His private life and beliefs inform his work, even when he is talking about evolution and the atomic bomb.

Born in Indiana in 1922, Vonnegut was a true Midwesterner liberal. His Socialist ancestors fled Germany during the 1848 revolution and settled in Indianapolis, where for three generations they distinguished themselves as the city’s leading architects. The Vonneguts believed in reason, progress, reform and science. (Vonnegut’s brother, in fact, would invent the process for creating artificial rain.) But the family’s wealth and prominence ended with the Great Depression. The Stock Market Crash reduced Vonnegut’s father to a gibbering wreck and drove his mother to suicide. Later his beloved and talented sister died of a brain tumor, and his brother-in-law died in a freak car crash. Young Kurt never recovered from these traumas. A curse for him, but a blessing for the reader.

Vonnegut dreamed of being an anthropologist, an engineer or a physicist, but life had other plans. Drafted in World War II and shipped to his ancestral Germany, he was captured and sent to Dresden, just in time to witness the worst aerial bombardment in history, which may not have been a military necessary. After surviving friendly fire, Vonnegut was forced to shovel the gooey remains of civilians into mass graves. These atrocities made their way into “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Vonnegut’s other postapocalyptic fiction. But his signature style, that of a Martian explorer generating reports about our damaged and crazy planet, was perfected after the war, when he worked as a technical writer and a publicist at General Electric.

Vonnegut was not an extraterrestrial, however, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. The landscapes he loved shaped his art. For example, Vonnegut lived in Ithaca while attending Cornell University, and his fiction alludes to Central New York as often as the Midwest. A Middle American at heart, he believed in and honored simple human decency, the Protestant work ethic and pride in craftsmanship. Of all our great postmodern novelists, Vonnegut remains the most democratic, and the most humane. “Just because the universe is cruel and absurd,” he said, “doesn’t mean humanity can’t be kind and thoughtful.”

Readers never know what will happen in a Vonnegut novel, where quantum mechanics meets Warner Brothers animation. But if they closely pay attention, they will find that everything is connected: politics and religion, economics and the environment, reason and madness. If you want to see behind the smoke and mirrors of modern media, Vonnegut remains the best teacher.

*Olivia Rebert contributed to this piece.

Anthony DiRenzo is an associate professor of writing. E-mail him at direnzo@ithaca.edu.