Author Kurt Vonnegut will be the featured speaker tonight at 8 at Shriver Hall on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University.

His topic will be "The Importance of Free Speech: Thoughts by an Author." His speech is the final of a series of six in the 1991 Eisenhower Symposium Series that deal with the topic "The Imprisonment of Ideas: The First Amendment in Crisis."

In more than 40 years as a writer, Mr. Vonnegut, 69, has written a number of novels, including "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughter-House Five," "Breakfast of Champions" and "Hocus Pocus." His latest book is "Fates Worse Than Death: an Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s," a collection of essays and speeches. He recently was elected as one of 50 members of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mr. Vonnegut's speech is free and open to the public. Other speakers in the Eisenhower Series this year included Alan Dershowitz and Sydney Schanberg.