As anyone who’s read it will tell you, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is a classic. But it also has a backstory that’s as interesting as the novel itself. It’s this backstory that writer Tom Roston covers in his new book, The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut And The Many Lives Of Slaughterhouse-Five (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview, Roston discusses how he came to write it, and what he got out of it.