Kurt Vonnegut‘s recent death has not stopped And So It Goes, the biography that Charles J. Shields started working on last year. MediaBistro reports that Shields is still working on it. “On the day before Vonnegut fell, I was at his home in Manhattan,” he says. Vonnegut came into the living room with a dictionary and told Shields to look him up. “I riffled though the pages and found where ‘Vonnegut, Kurt’ should be, but he wasn’t there.” Vonnegut then told him to note that there was an entry for Jack Kerouac. “He looked at me morosely. ‘How about that?'”
Shiels also explains his perseverance with a family reference. “My grandmother used to say, ‘If you don’t do what I asked after I’m dead, I’ll come at night and pull the bedclothes off.’ I don’t want to risk Kurt getting the same idea because I didn’t come through for him.”
Shiels is still looking for people who had memorable encounters with Vonnegut and his writing, and asks them to contact him through his web site. When contacted by SFScope about the complete absence of any mention of the project on his web site, Shields said “you’ve driven home the point to me that I need to put something on the site about the Vonnegut project.”
Shields’s previous projects include books on George Lucas, Roald Dahl, and Harper Lee.