Breakfast of Champions 1973 provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonneguts obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonneguts literary reputation.The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon 1918-1985, a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and that was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover one of Vonneguts typically boosterish, lost, and stupid mid-American characters, and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonneguts gallery.
