Author Kurt Vonnegut is in a critical but stable condition at a New York hospital after a fire at his home in Manhattan.

The 77-year-old writer, whose books Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle have given him a worldwide following, suffered from smoke inhalation in the blaze, which broke out on Sunday evening.

Fire department officials said it broke out in a rear bedroom on the top floor of his four-storey house, where he was at home with his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, and his daughter Lily Vonnegut, who escaped unharmed.

It's believed Vonnegut had been watching the Super Bowl in his study and was downstairs when the fire erupted.

They credited a neighbour, Hans von Stackelberg, with saving the family.

Von Stackelberg, acting head of the German Consulate in New York, said the real hero was his 17-year-old daughter Filippa, who called 911. "All I did was rush out of the house like an idiot," he said.

Authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire, which took 60 firefighters 20 minutes to put out.

Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut's best known work, is his 1969 treatise on the bombing of the German city of Dresden in World War II.

A young soldier in the US army, he had been taken prisoner in the city, but survived with other PoWs by hiding in an underground meat locker. After bombing, in which 135,000 people died, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were forced to dig corpses out of the rubble.

Other works by Vonnegut include Breakfast of Champions and Hocus Pocus. His last major work, Timequake, was published in 1997.