Heller

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American satirist best remembered for writing the satiric World War II classic Catch-22. The novel was partly based on Heller's own war experiences and its literary devices are continued on into his other novels. more...

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It influenced, among others, Robert Altman's comedy M*A*S*H and the subsequent long-running TV series, set in the Korean War. The phrase "Catch-22" has entered the English language to signify a no-win situation, particularly one created by a law, regulation or circumstance.

Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War satirists. Although he is remembered mostly by his landmark Catch 22, his works, centered on the lives of various members of the middle-classes, remain exceptional exemplars of modern satire.

Biography

(1923-1960) Early life and pre-Catch-22' occupations

Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents. His Russian-born father, Isaac Heller, a bakery truck driver, died in 1927 because of a botched ulcer operation. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Force. He was stationed in Corsica, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. In 1949 Heller received his M.A. from Columbia University. He was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford University from 1949 to 1950. He taught English composition for two years at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52), before becoming a copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-1956) and Look (1956-1958), and promotion manager for McCall's. He left McCall's in 1961 to teach fiction and dramatic writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania.

(1961-1970) Catch-22

"All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight." (from Catch-22)

Heller sold his first stories as a student. They were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly and Esquire. In the early 1950s he started working on Catch-22. At that time Heller was employed as a copywriter at a small advertising agency. Most of the book he wrote in the foyer of a West End Avenue apartment. "As I've said and repeat, I wrote the first chapter in longhand one morning in 1953, hunched over my desk at the advertising agency (from ideas and words that had leaped into my mind only the night before); the chapter was published in the quarterly New World Writing #7 in 1955 under the title 'Catch-18'. (I received twenty-five dollars. The same issue carried a chapter from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, under a pseudonym.)" (from Now and Then, 1998) The novel went largely unnoticed until 1962, when its English publication received critical praise. And in The New York World-Telegram Richard Starnes opened his column with the prophetic words: "Yossarian will, I think, live a very long time." An earlier reviewer called the book "repetitious and monotonous", and another "dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights."

Read more at Wikipedia.org