Basic Training

Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey", this 20,000-word novella was never published in Vonnegut’s lifetime. It appears (from the address on the manuscript, a suburb of Schenectady, New York, and from the style and slant) to have been written in the late 1940s. Vonnegut was working at that time in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting. He was trying to sell to the so-called slick magazines of the time, lik…