Kilgore Trout

[Andrew Foley]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, Derek C. Maus wrote:

<snip>

>I was reading Tony Tanner's CITY OF WORDS recently and noticed that he,
>too, seems to think that Varo was a creation of Pynchon's, necessary for
>the symbolic overtones contained within "Borando del Manto Terrestre." Of
>course, he also seems to think that Kilgore Trout was simply a
>science-fiction writer to whom Vonnegut was alluding rather than a
>nom-de-plume and fictional invention...


As far as I'm aware, Vonnegut never used Kilgore Trout as a pseudonym.  KT's
_Venus on the Half Shell_ was written, with Vonnegut's permission, by Philip
José Farmer, who at the time was writing a series of stories by fictional
authors.  Farmer had discovered that "pretending" to be another writer was a
good cure for writer's block, so he "borrowed" author-characters from other
people's fiction (including Doctor Watson and David Copperfield, IIRC).
VotHS was the only one of these stories to be novel-length.