The American literary world yesterday mourned the death of Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, who began writing satire and science fiction after surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a Second World War prisoner of war.

Vonnegut, whose 15 novels also include Cat’s Cradle and Hocus Pocus, died on Wednesday night from brain injuries that he suffered in a fall several weeks ago at his Manhattan home. He was 84.

“He gave new licence to mixing the sad and the funny, even the tragic and the burlesque,” John Irving, who studied with Vonnegut at the Iowa writer’s workshop, told The Times.

“For someone whose work was distinguished by how stupid and lacking in charity human beings can be or are, he was a real gentleman — a sweet, caring guy.”

Gore Vidal noted that Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and himself were among the last American writers who served in the Second World War and called him “the best of our generation”. “Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull,” Vidal said.

Tom Wolfe, the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities whose first book had a blurb from Vonnegut, told the Los Angeles Times: “He’s the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it. He was never funny just to be funny.”

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