• The 50 Best Slaughterhouse-Five Covers from Around the World

    For the Iconic Novel's 50th Birthday

    Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, turns 50 this week. Originally published on March 31, 1969, the novel—a genre-bending WWII story about a soldier who becomes “unstuck in time”—was Vonnegut’s first to become a bestseller, and 50 years later, it’s still his most beloved and influential. Many a teenage mind has been blown by Slaughterhouse-Five, and many an adult mind, too. To celebrate the birthday of this essential American novel, I looked at how it’s been covered over the years—both at home and abroad. Some of the below covers are beautiful, some impactful, and some simply odd, but they all make me want to read the book again.

    First Edition cover, Delacorte, 1969 Mondadori (Italian), 1969 Gyldendal (Danish), 1969 Meulenhoff (Dutch), 1970 Hoffmann und Campe (German), 1970 Dell first edition paperback, 1971 Kirjastus Eesti Raamat (Estonian), 1971 Mladá fronta (Czech), 1973 BIGZ (Serbian), 1973 J’ai Lu (French), 1973 Dell paperback, 1976 Editorial Bruguera (Spanish), 1977 早川書房 (Japanese), 1978 Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 1980 Vintage, 1982 Military Publishers (Bulgaria), 1982 Mondadori (Italian), 1988 Polish edition, 1990 Dell paperback, 1991 Vintage 1991 Swedish edition, 1996 Vintage UK, 2000 Maecenas Könyvkiadó (Hungarian), 2001 Anagrama (Spanish), 2006 Kitos knygos (Lithuanian), 2006 Argo (Czech), 2008 Folio Society, ill. John Holder, 2008 АСТ Москва (Russian), 2009 Bertrand Editora (Portugese), 2011 Tammi (Finnish), 2012 Norstedts (Swedish), 2013 AST (Russian), 2014 Feltrinelli (Italian), 2014 Видавництво Старого Лева (Ukranian), 2014 ART (Romanian), 2014 Helikon (Hungarian), 2014 April Yayıncılık (Turkish), 2015 დიოგენე (Georgian), 2015 Penguin Australia Vintage Classics edition, 2016 麥田出版社 (Chinese), 2016 Slovart (Slovak), 2016 HoCa – Belletristik (German), 2016 Points (French), 2016 Argo (Czech), 2016 Gyldendal (Danish), 2016 ART (Romanian), 2017 Knygos (Lithuanian), 2017 Zysk i S-ka (Polish), 2018 Penguin UK Vintage Classics, 50th Anniversary Edition, 2019 Intrínseca (Portuguese), 2019



    Emily Temple
    Emily Temple
    Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
    https://www.emilytemple.net/





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