Will Higgins

will.higgins@indystar.com

The boyhood home of writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is for sale for $899,000, but it's unclear what additional value, if any, the Vonnegut provenance adds to the property.

It's a high-end place — four bedrooms, Arts & Crafts style, big trees, Butler-Tarkington neighborhood — regardless of who was a child there.

Owners Cheryl and Paul Walton bought the house at 4401 N. Illinois St. in 2008, before they knew of the Vonnegut connection.

But the Waltons quickly realized what they had, and they've been careful stewards of the house. An imprint of Vonnegut's child-size hand remains in concrete that was poured in the 1920s. In the entry is a stained-glass window with the initials K and V.

The 5,907-square-foot house was designed by Vonnegut's architect father, Kurt Vonnegut Sr. He and his wife, Edith, and their three children moved into the home in 1923.

They were riding high. Vonnegut Sr.'s architecture practice was going well, and his wife had inherited money from her beer baron father.

The family's fortunes turned south during the Great Depression, however, and in 1930, they had to sell the house and move into a smaller one. They had to quit the Woodstock Club, too, and Kurt, the youngest child, was taken out of private school and sent to public school.

But Vonnegut loved public school, said his friend and fellow writer Dan Wakefield. "He didn't want that stuff his mother wanted for him, all the social stuff," Wakefield said.

Vonnegut's mixing with everyday people "made him a different kind of writer than he would have been," Wakefield said. "He wouldn't have been the guy who had lunch with (the socialist labor leader) Powers Hapgood, and he wouldn't have been the guy who quoted the sermon on the mount every chance he got."

"Was I a sad child, knowing how rich my family had been?" Vonnegut wrote in the autobiograpical "Palm Sunday." "Not at all."

The Waltons tried to sell the house privately to several foundations and universities, including the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, marketing it as a writer's retreat that also could be used for entertaining, Cheryl Walton said. "We want to make sure we sell to the right person," she said. But there were no takers.

They listed the house with F.C. Tucker Co.'s Matt McLaughlin two weeks ago.

The house is in fine condition, McLaughlin said. The Waltons made several improvements, such as converting the old coal chute to a wine cellar. But unlike some of the grand old houses that dot Butler-Tarkington and the adjacent Meridian-Kessler neighborhood, 4401 N. Illinois St. has never been gutted or messed up.

The one bit of serious remodeling was done under the direction of architect Evans Woollen, who lived in the house with his family for three decades, into the late 1980s. Woollen, whose work in Indianapolis includes Clowes Hall, the Minton-Capehart Federal Building and a number of high-end mid-century-style houses, raised the ceiling in the living room. In so doing he removed the master bedroom, Kurt Sr. and Edith's bedroom.

Cheryl Walton recalled Vonnegut telling the house's previous owners, Vaughn and Melissa Hickman, that he was glad his parents' bedroom was no more because it was mostly a place of sadness, of hysterical bickering.

Woollen's son Ian also became a writer. A Bloomington resident and marriage and family therapist, he published his third novel last month, "Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb."

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.