Mark Vonnegut says that many of his father's ideas first surfaced in family conversations. (Kelly Wilkinson / Indianapolis Star)

Last April, Kurt Vonnegut was set to deliver a speech on the campus of Butler University as part of the citywide "Year of Vonnegut" in Indianapolis. Unfortunately, he never made it back to his native Hoosier state, dying on April 11, 2007, after complications from a fall he suffered in his Manhattan home. Instead, his only son, Mark Vonnegut, delivered Kurt's final speech for him to a full crowd at Clowes Hall. Mark wrote his own book, "The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity," recounting his experiences starting a commune fresh out of college, only to have it fall apart as he developed schizophrenia. After his recovery, he went to Harvard Medical School and is now a pediatrician in Boston.

He wrote the introduction to a new collection of his father's unpublished writings, "Armageddon in Retrospect."

Just weeks after your father's death, you're asked to go on stage, reading your father's last ever work, really, some of his last words, to a crowd of thousands. What was that experience like?

It was a very odd thing. And I had an odd feeling of being in some strange way in touch with my father while I was reading it. He had written the speech, but I honestly think he knew he wasn't going to give it. He loved being on stages, and I don't like it very much (laughs). But I felt like I could do it. I know how his mind works, I know the rhythms. And I just tried to capture that.

From the time he fell, to his passing away, to the speech, was only short matter of time. You didn't have much time to grieve before preparing.

Yes, from the time he fell to the time he died was a couple weeks. He was really in a situation where it was pretty clear early on that intact survival was not going to happen. And then that survival at all was not going to happen. And we knew for at least two weeks that he wouldn't be able to give the speech. Once he passed, I thought I'd honor his commitment. So we dug through his papers, found the speech and went for it.

Looking back on the year since you delivered the speech, how would you characterize the "Year of Vonnegut" in Indianapolis, especially the event at Clowes Hall, which, ended, as I'm sure you remember, with your mother-in-law's giving a very moving impromptu eulogy.

I felt like we did the right thing. The family showed up. And that's what this whole year has felt like. When people first asked if I'd be willing to write the introduction to this collection, I thought 'Nah, just let the guy rest, leave him alone." And then when I started working with the material (for Armageddon"), it felt like a healthy, good thing to do.

When the citywide celebration of his work was announced (in early 2007), Mr. Vonnegut said he was deeply honored. But he had a strained relationship with Indianapolis. Why do you think your father had such mixed feelings about where he grew up?

For a time, he felt very disapproved of. As a writer, he had close friends and even relatives who disapproved of his politics, thinking they were too liberal and were upset because he used swear words. There were bookstores in Indianapolis that wouldn't carry his work because they thought his use of certain words was unacceptable. And then when he showed up in the late '60s or early '70s, to a book signing [in Indianapolis] and virtually no one showed up, I think he felt sort of rejected. He thought the powers that be in Indiana were so conservative, and he knew they didn't like him and so, to that extent, he didn't like them back.

Did that temper subside as he grew older?

I think it did. He loved his Indianapolis heritage very much. He had a great deal of respect for the German free-thinking culture that he grew out of. He loved his father's and grandfather's (architectural) work around the city. And he loved his Shortridge High School. There was certainly a lot he was proud of.

He was always proud of being a Hoosier and always seemed to say so. How did he reconcile being so in love with his state, yet at odds with his hometown?

He was very proud of both. He was in love with and in touch with parts of the city as well. And he felt that until the very end that Indianapolis had sort of rejected him. But I think regardless, he'll be remembered as a great writer.

After initially scoffing at putting this book together, why did you change your mind, and how did it get organized?

Before he died, he had been working on a project with his publisher, and they had never been able to come up with a book. Then at the end, they asked if there was any unpublished stuff. Kurt had, as you know, donated all his paper to the Lilly Libraries (in Bloomington and Indianapolis). And these manuscripts were great. Clearly these stories had been written and rewritten, and so they were very polished and needed very little work.

I suppose you've been the unofficial spokesman for the Vonnegut family in the year since Kurt's death. Do you ever get tired of being Kurt Vonnegut's son, especially since you've been asked to interpret and comment so much on his life?

Yeah, I do. And people expect me to know many things about my father that I simply don't know. And like most young men I left the house in the early 20s. And I had a good relationship with my father. But I kind of feel like I felt about the speech and this book's introduction: This is a process that I'm about done with. It's not like I'm rejecting it at all. But I have another life as a pediatrician and another life with my own family. And I feel like I've done what I could to tie up some loose ends for my father. But I'm looking forward to sort of going back into the woodwork.

A few years ago, I read your book "The Eden Express" and enjoyed it very much. Have you thought about publishing again?

Yes, I write all the time. And people ask, where did that tendency come from? Well, Kurt was a compulsive writer, and he never threw anything away. And I've been writing continuously, too. Someday I'll probably write another book. It'll probably deal with my career in medicine and living life with serious mental illness.

In the mid-1990s, Kurt claimed he was done writing and that he'd paint from then on. Was that true?

No. He started telling me in his mid-40s that he was done, that he had nothing more to say, leave him alone and that writing was too hard. But he did have a great deal more to say. And he was writing well into his 80s and he was unhappy that it wasn't as easy for him to do, but he couldn't have stopped writing on a bet.

Will more unpublished stuff come out?

I don't know. We still haven't gone through all his papers. But I love the high quality of this collection and how these pieces hang together. I don't want to start getting into an industry of digging up every little thing he wrote and scribbled. I don't know for a fact whether there is another book's worth of material. But I don't want to keep doing it unless it's good.

Growing up with him writing in the house, did your father try out his ideas, jokes, or characters on you?

Yeah! The dinner table was always a lively place. Sometimes he stole (ideas) from us. Like when us kids had a gang and we each had code names ... like Wampeter (which showed up in his short-story collection, "Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons"). A lot of stuff he put in the books he stole from his kids! (laughs) And he never gave us credit for it either.

What was your father like when he was writing?

He had his own special wing in an old house on Cape Cod. It was an uninsulated room with a little wooden stove. And us kids were always happy to hear the typewriter going well because that meant the writing was going well. But if it wasn't, we'd worry because then he'd be in a bad mood. He'd write every day. But then he'd take long walks with the dog and think. And he'd paint. And he was always working. He was a writer; so he was always thinking when he was eating breakfast, trying to make an idea or a sentence work. Always thinking when he was doing other things. And he was so thrilled when it worked.

At the end of his writing life, he got fairly political, culminating in his 2005 collection A Man Without a Country. In the context of that, coupled with his many works of fiction, how do you think history will judge him as a writer?

I think the politics and the fact he was in the Rodney Dangerfield movie (1986's "Back to School") and whether or not he supported terrorism will all go away. And people will be left with a beautiful writer who wrote very well-told stories. I still think reading a well-told story is the best education there is. That's why so many readers read him and say, 'Aha! This is what writing is supposed to be."

After writing a few dozen books and millions of words, do you think he had any regrets, and if so, what do you think he would hold as his biggest one?

At the end of his life, I think definitely, the Iraq War and the fact it was still going on. But personally, I think he had a charmed life. I think he was a sweet, wonderful, really bright kid who was blown out of the water with what happened to him in World War II. He struggled for a lifetime to make himself whole after that. And I think in large part he succeeded, but I think he was always haunted by what happened to him in Dresden.

So you think he was never able to come to terms with his war experiences?

No. If you're a 20-year-old kid and you're put in a forced labor brigade to go take mostly women and children who've been dead for a number of days and pull them out of shelters by the hundreds with babies strewn around in a scarified landscape and put them in large funeral pyres ... and that's what you do for several days and you realize that your own air force had done this. How could that not scar you?

- Daniel Robison / For The Star