Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. He is best known for his first novel, Catch-22, published in 1961, a satire on war and bureaucracy whose title became a standard term for an absurd or contradictory choice. Heller was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice, in 1972 and 1975.

Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, who came from Russia. As a teenager, he wrote a story about the Soviet invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, he worked for a year as a blacksmith’s apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk.

In 1942, at age 19, Heller joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier with the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force. He later remembered the war as “fun in the beginning,” saying it gave him the feeling that there was something glorious about it. After coming home, he said he felt like a hero, though he also described many of the missions as “largely milk runs.”

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and New York University on the G.I. Bill, graduating from NYU in 1948. He earned an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1949, spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine’s Society, Oxford, and taught composition at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952. He also worked for Time Inc. and as a copywriter at a small advertising agency, where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. At home, he wrote; in 1948, The Atlantic published one of his short stories.

The first spark of Catch-22 came one morning in 1953, when Heller thought of the opening lines about Yossarian and the chaplain. He soon invented the characters, plot, and tone, and the first chapter appeared in 1955 as “Catch-18” in New World Writing. The finished novel followed Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian as he tried to avoid combat missions while military bureaucracy kept finding ways to hold him. Published in 1961 to mixed reviews, the book sold slowly at first in hardback in the United States, but after its 1962 paperback release it found a large audience among baby boomers who identified with its anti-war sentiments. It went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States.

Heller’s later work stayed close to modern satire, often centered on middle-class life. He worked on scripts, including the final screenplay for the film adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, and wrote a television comedy script that aired as part of McHale’s Navy. In 1967, he wrote the play We Bombed in New Haven, which carried an anti-war message while discussing the Vietnam War. Heller’s words still carry because he gave a sharp comic shape to confusion, fear, and official absurdity, especially in the phrase that made his name: Catch-22.