Since the day Mark Twain joined the lecture circuit, Americans have wanted their authors to be performers -- and Kurt Vonnegut didn't let them down.

	Joe Gill, The Express-Times Author Kurt Vonnegut gives the address at Lehigh University's 136th Commencement in Bethlehem, Pa., on May 24, 2004 Click photo for larger image. Remembrances of the author Click here to view reader tributes to Mr. Vonnegut or to share your own remembrance.

The novelist, who died Wednesday at 84 in New York City, had become more of an entertainer than a writer in his later years, a familiar wooly-haired professional scold on the commencement ceremony and lecture circuit.

Mr. Vonnegut drew large crowds because of his fame as a writer whose iconoclastic novels found a cult-like following among several generations of young people prepared to challenge America's image as a great nation.

"He was a very funny guy at one time," said Hilary Masters, "but then he got too much into this quasi-folksiness, this Mark Twain image with the hair and the suits."

Mr. Vonnegut's 15th and last novel, "Timequake," appeared in 1997 and his final published work, "A Man Without a Country," in 2005, was a collection of semi-autobiographical essays on literature and politics.

He also maintained a busy schedule of appearances, capitalizing on his popularity as a writer to hector audiences on what he saw as the sad state of mankind and culture. Mr. Vonnegut's last Pittsburgh appearance was Nov. 9, 1998.

In defending his performances, he said:

"I do think that public speaking is almost the only way a poet or novelist or playwright can have any political effectiveness in his creative prime."

A novelist and essayist himself, Mr. Masters said he met Mr. Vonnegut in the 1960s "when he began to bloom as a unique writer. There was nobody around who wrote like him.

"The funny thing is that when he started out, he was a pretty conventional writer in books like 'Player Piano,' Then something happened. We were all very taken with 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' " said the Carnegie Mellon University literature and writing professor.

Mr. Vonnegut constructed that 1969 novel from his experiences in the massive Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Feb. 13, 1945. A U.S. Army scout captured at the Battle of the Bulge, he was imprisoned there as a POW and survived the bombing in an underground slaughterhouse.

The death toll was estimated between 60,000 and 100,000. Mr. Vonnegut and other American prisoners were forced to unearth and burn the corpses.

"Slaughterhouse-Five," with its nonlinear construction and science fiction aspects, quickly became seen as another assault on the Vietnam War and promoted its author as a popular social critic.

The Modern Library ranking of the 20th-century's major 100 novels places the book at No. 18.

"Vonnegut was important in that he brought a saving humor, an outraged love of humanity and a crotchety common sense to American writing of the 1960s," said Stewart O'Nan, Pittsburgh-born novelist of such books as "Everyday People," "A Prayer for the Dying" and "The Good Wife."

"His satire was irreverent at times but always relevant."

Mr. Vonnegut emerged in 1952 among the talented crop of post-war male writers who reworked Ernest Hemingway's romantically tinged male adventure stories by replacing the romance with cynicism and a uniquely American brand of existentialism.

A former reporter and public relations staffer at General Electric, he wrote a series of poorly selling novels, including "Mother Night," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," until achieving widespread fame with his antiwar book.

Despite his success, Mr. Vonnegut battled depression and survived a suicide attempt in 1984, and at one point, renounced his novelist's career.

"I felt after I finished 'Slaughterhouse-Five' that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he said in 1974, after finishing "Breakfast of Champions."

But, a series of books, including eight novels, followed that statement.

"He was of that last generation of writers whose work was awaited like news -- devoured and discussed by the entire American middle class, from teens to housewives," Mr. O'Nan said.

Mr. Vonnegut's critics called his books "sentimental," a sop to his fans and the counter-culture and "too obvious" in their message.

Although all of Mr. Vonnegut's novels remain in print, his later work failed to find a home at the leading publishing houses.

His last books were published by the small independent Seven Stories Press in New York, prompting Mr. O'Nan to observe:

"It may be the saddest commentary of all on the publishing industry that he couldn't find a mainstream house for his last book."