Mother Night

Mother Night is a novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut, first published in February 1962. The title of the book is taken from Goethe’s Faust (and ultimately from the Egyptian Goddess Nuit, mother of Osiris, Horus, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, and her counterparts in European religions, such as Skaði).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. Howard W. Campbell also appears briefly in Vonnegut’s later novel Slaughterhouse-Five.