Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.

Last night I spent some time reading a story about a young writer who has a new book coming out this spring. About a quarter of the way through, there was this: "Inspired by reading Kurt Vonnegut, [he] began writing in high school." I chuckled after seeing that, and wondered why we even bother mentioning it anymore. Let's make it a default line in any writer's bio: "Read Vonnegut in high school, began writing." After finishing the article, I bounced over to a news site and saw that Vonnegut, who had fallen several weeks ago and was unable to recover from the sustained injuries, had died at 84. I doubt we'll stop seeing his name pop up in stories about writers anytime soon.

It's no overstatement to say that Vonnegut was one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century, and certainly no stretch to compare him—as he's often been—to Mark Twain.

A few months back, a friend was discussing a story he was writing for a magazine, about the new "men's bookshelf," a shelf that appears in guys' living rooms or offices, one that once contained writers like, say, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He rattled off a few of the authors who would be on there, and it felt like a veritable Vonnegut family tree. Of course, Vonnegut himself was on there, right at the top. And of course, it isn't just guys who appreciated his mix of humor and pathos.

I know it's silly to mourn the death of someone you never met, but Vonnegut had such a huge presence in my life, I found myself shaken last night. I read Cat's Cradle as summer reading, entering my freshman year in high school. From that point on I must have written an essay on Vonnegut nearly every quarter for four years of high school. My AP English test essay was on God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. When I worked a soul-sucking mall job in high school, I stopped each week at the bookstore and picked up a new Vonnegut to help me get through. (I had to play with devil sticks in front of a yuppie-hippie store and, while juggling, implore kids to drag their parents into the store: There was some Vonnegutian absurdity in that.) I've questioned friendships with people who thought Vonnegut silly. And when interviewing for this job, I dug out an old literary magazine that contained his famous story, "Harrison Bergeron," and gave it to our editor-in-chief. Yes, I used Vonnegut to suck up.

And since he was such a proponent of laughter as a response to sadness, I'll end with one of my all-time favorite Vonnegut quotes, from Breakfast of Champions, because it shows off both his humor and the moral underpinnings that ran beneath all of his work: "Let us devote to unselfishness the frenzy we once gave gold and underpants."