Joseph Heller in 1961

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 - December 12, 1999) was an American novelist best remembered for writing the satiric World War II classic Catch-22.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Coney Island to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. During World War II he flew sixty missions as a bombardier with the Twelfth Air Force in B-25s in North Africa and Italy. From 1948 to 1950, he studied at the University of Southern California, New York University, Columbia and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he was a Fulbright scholar. During this time he began to write short fiction.

He taught composition at the Pennsylvania State University for two years and in 1952 returned to New York and worked as a writer in advertising for the magazines Look, McCall's and "Time Magazine". In 1953 he wrote the beginning of "Catch 18" which, in 1961, was to be published as the famous Catch-22. In addition to novels, he wrote stage plays, screenplays for films, short stories, articles, memoirs and reviews.

Heller also wrote:

• Something Happened (1974)
• Good As Gold (1979)
• God Knows (1984)
• Picture This (1988)
• Closing Time (1994)
• Now And Then (1999)
• Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man (2000)

There is a Joseph Heller Archive at the University at South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library [1].

Quotations

• "When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"