The title of the book comes from a passage in Goethe's Faust,[3] where Mephistopheles gives the name Mother Night to the primordial Darkness before the Light of creation, and hopes and predicts that the Light, and creation, must soon fail and the Darkness return.[4]
Vonnegut told Charlie Rose in 1996 that he was paid $3,000 for it (equivalent to $23,000 in 2023) at a time when he "needed the money", and also explained the idea for the story as follows:[5]
I got the idea at a cocktail party on Cape Cod. [...] I lived there for 20 years, and I met a spymaster. The guy had been a spymaster during the Second World War, and he was complaining about spy films, that they made no sense. He said, "Any time you have an agent inside an enemy country, this is a very sick person you are dealing with."
He also explains the inspiration for Campbell's character:
The British actually had a treacherous citizen who broadcast for the Nazis, Lord Haw-Haw, and he was hanged by the British after the war for treason. I said, "All right, suppose an American does this."
