Mother Night

Mother Night is a novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in February 1962. The novel takes the form of the fictional memoirs of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American, who moved to Germany in 1923 at age 11, and later became a well-known playwright and Nazi propagandist. The story of the novel is narrated (through the use of metafiction) by Campbell himself, writing his memoirs while awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison. Campbell also appears briefly in Vonnegut's later novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Background The title of the book comes from a line in Goethe's Faust. Vonnegut told Charlie Rose in 1996 that he was paid $3,000 for it at a time when he "needed the money", and also explained the idea for the story as follows:I got the idea at a cocktail party on Cape Cod. [...] I lived there for 20 years, and I met a spymaster. The guy had been a spymaster during the Second World War, and he was complaining about spy films, that they made no sense. He said, "Any time you have an agent inside an enemy country, this is a very sick person you are dealing with."He also explains the inspiration for Campbell's character:The British actually had a treacherous citizen who broadcast for the Nazis, Lord Haw-Haw, and he was hanged by the British after the war for treason. I said, "All right, suppose an American does this."