Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the fictional town of Midland City, it is the story of "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast." One of these men, Dwayne Hoover, is a normal-looking but deeply deranged Pontiac dealer and Burger Chef franchise owner who becomes obsessed with the writings of the other man, Kilgore Trout, taking them for literal truth. Trout, a largely unknown pulp science fiction writer who has appeared in several other Vonnegut novels, looks like a crazy old man but... is in fact relatively sane. As the novel opens, Trout journeys toward Midland City to appear at a convention where he is destined to meet Dwayne Hoover and unwittingly inspire him to run amok. In the preface Vonnegut states that as he reached his fiftieth birthday he felt a need to "clear his head of all the junk in there" -- which includes the various subjects of his drawings, and the characters from his past novels and stories.
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| Author: | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Genre: | Novel, Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative fiction |
| Year published: | 1973 |
| Number of editions: | 20 |