Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born in May 1, 1923, in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn, New York. He died December 12, 1999 in East Hampton, New York. Joseph Heller was an American writer and novelist whose most famous work, Catch-22, published in 1961 became a significant work of protest literature and a popular idiom in the English language.

Born to first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants, Isaac and Lena Heller, Joseph Heller's father was a bakery-truck driver who died after a failed operation when Heller was five years old. The sardonic and wisecracking humor that marked Joseph Heller's writing style was considered to have been influenced by the author's childhood in Coney Island, where the style of humor is considered common. Lena Heller never learned to speak English well, and the family struggled financially.

Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.

Heller began his formal education at Coney Island's Public School No. 188. In 1941, he would graduate from Abraham Lincoln High School and went to work right away as a file clerk for an insurance agency. He would later say he knew from a young age he wanted to be a writer and began writing short stories during his high school years.

In 1942, as America's role in the Second World War continued to progress, Heller joined the Army and worked as a file clerk. In October of the same year, he switched to the Army Air Forces, as the aviation branch was then known, with the intention to be a gunner on a bomber. However, Heller was informed, erroneously, that the gunner's average life span in combat was three days; so he instead enrolled in cadet school to become an officer and a bombardier.

Image of Joseph Heller in his B-25 J Mitchell bomber.

A B-25 J Mitchell painted to represent the plane Heller flew.

After his graduation, Heller was assigned to the 488th Squadron of the Twelfth Air Force in Corsica. He would later say he had no complaints of his time during his service and enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow airmen on base. However, an integral moment came during a bombing raid on Avignon in the Southeast of France, which informed a fictionalized account in his later novel Catch-22. During his service, Heller flew sixty combat missions as a bombardier over Corsica and the Mediterranean, and in Europe. He earned an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit Citation.

Following Joseph Heller's honorable discharge from the army at the conclusion of the Second World War, Heller used the GI Bill to enroll at the University of Southern California in 1945. At this same time, he was able to publish his first short story in the prestigious Story magazine. The same year saw Heller marry Shirley Held, with whom he eventually had two children, Erica Jill and Theodore Michael. The next year, Heller transferred to New York University.

At NYU, Heller learned, in part, under the tutelage of Professor Maurice Baudin, who helped him come to believe that he could be a professional writer. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, with the distinction of being named to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. In the same year, Heller published two short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and two more in Esquire. In 1949, Heller attended Columbia University and received an M.A. the same year. The following year, Heller earned a Fulbright scholarship to attend the University of Oxford for a year to continue his studies, before returning to the United States in 1950 to teach English composition at Pennsylvania State University and fiction and dramatic writing at Yale University.

Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 while working at a New York City marketing firm where he produced ad copy. During his time writing as an advertising copywriter, Heller worked for magazines Time from 1952 to 1956 and Look from 1956 to 1958, before working as a promotion manager for McCall's from 1958 to 1961. At this time, Heller began writing Catch-22 in his spare time. As well as Catch-22, Heller spent time writing short stories and scripts for film and television during this period.

First Edition cover of Heller's novel Catch-22.

Catch-22 drew on Heller's Air Force experience and presents a war story that is hilarious, grotesque, cynical, and stirring, according to some critics. The novel generated some controversy upon its publication in 1961, with some critics adoring the novel, and other despising it, often for the same reasons. The novel deals with a World War II pilot Yossarian, who believes his foolish, ambitious, mean-spirited commanding officers are more dangerous than the enemy. In the novel, in order for Yossarian to avoid flying more missions, he retreats to a hospital with a mysterious liver complaint, wrecks his plane, and tries to get himself declared insane.

But, in the book, if the character makes a formal request to be relieved of such missions, the act of making the request proves he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. This conundrum informed the adoption of the term "catch-22" in the English language, as a reference to a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.

Joseph Heller while writing Catch-22.

The novel sold slowly, but developed a cult following from the novel's dark surrealism, never making it near a bestseller list. The novel presented an unsentimental vision of war, stripping romantic pretense from combat, and replaced visions of glory and honor with a comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. This irony came to be expected of war novels since the Vietnam War, but was shocking in the wake of the second World War, which was largely considered a just and heroic war by the American public. As well, unlike other antiromantic war novels, Catch-22 is fundamentally different in the protagonist hope that the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war.

With the success of Catch-22, Heller was able to quit his job at McCall's and turned to focus his efforts on writing fiction and plays.

Although it did not arise until April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to the Sunday Times of London based on his belief that scenes in Catch-22 bore an "amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personal injuries, and incidents" to a novel published in England in 1951. This earlier book, written by Louis Falstein, was titled The Sky is a Lonely Place in Britain and Face of a Hero in the United States. This novel was available two years before Heller was known to have written the first chapter of Catch-22 while he was a student at Oxford.

The Times went on to state that "both [novels] have central characters who are using their wits to escape the aerial carnage; both are haunted by an omnipresent injured airman, invisible inside a white body cast." Heller replied to the controversy in a piece for the Washington Post, going on to say: "My book came out in 1961. I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself."

The author's second novel, Something Happened, was born in large part out of Heller's experience as a file clerk for an insurance company, and the office setting of the companies he worked for from 1952 to 1961. He took around a decade to write his second novel, but Heller considered the novel to be a work of genius. So convinced, the author stashed manuscripts all over Manhattan, ensuring that Something Happened would survive in the event his apartment burned down. As well, when he finally brought the completed draft to his agent, he brought his daughter with him on the trip, for her to deliver the manuscript in the case of him suffering a coronary or being hit by a car.

First Edition of Heller's Something Happened.

In 1974, thirteen years after Catch-22 was published and had begun its ascent into the realm of idiom, Something Happened was released to what has been described as a collective shrug. And the book began on a slippery slope towards obscurity, as an often forgotten novel. Some remember the book best for Kurt Vonnegut's appraisal of it in The New York Times Book Review, which described it as "one of the unhappiest books ever written."

Something Happened is, by design, a bleak novel, considered by some to be dense and overlong, almost to the point of taking sadistic pleasure in the reader's struggle, and offering a minimum in the way of resolution or plot. However, as readers have better understood what to expect from the novel, and by virtue of the bleakness of the novel, it has come to be considered a pleasurable, engrossing, and moving novel.

First edition of Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold.

Good as Gold, published in 1979, is notable in part for being Heller's first fictional use of his Jewish heritage and childhood experiences in Coney Island. The protagonist of the novel, Bruce Gold, is an unfulfilled college professor writing a book about "the Jewish experience" while also harboring political ambitions. Offered a high government position after giving a positive review of a book written by the president, Gold accepts and leaves his wife and children to find himself immersed in a farcical bureaucracy in which officials speak in a confusing and contradictory language.

The novel is often considered a satire of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the book suggests he forsook his Jewish identity in favor of politics and corruption, and with Gold's motive for entering politics being self-aggrandizing, as he seeks financial, sexual, and social rewards. The narrative alters between scenes of Gold's large, garrulous Jewish family and the mostly gentle milieu of Washington, employing realism to depict the former and parody to portray the latter.

Joseph Heller's other writings have included the screenplay for Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown, Casino Royale in 1967, and Dirty Dingus Magee from 1970. His plays included We Bombed in New Haven in 1969 and based on the Vietnam War, Catch-22 in 1973, and Clevinger's Trial in 1973. During much of his life, Joseph Heller wrote short stories, which went largely uncollected until after the author's death, in which a posthumous collection, Catch as Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings, was published in 2003. And in his later life, the author wrote an autobiography, No Laughing Matter, in 1986 and a memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in 1998, which detailed some of the events of his life and how they inspired his later works.

Starting in 1981, Joseph Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare type of polyneuritis that afflicts the peripheral nervous system. During this time, Heller was enjoying increasing literary success, but he was also experiencing difficulties in his personal life, as his wife Shirley Held and he separated in 1981, before officially divorcing in 1984.

Around this same time, Heller dealt with a significant episode with Guillain-Barre syndrome, spending months in near paralysis. Heller recovered, with help from his friend Speed Vogel, who also helped him write a chronicle of his medical difficulties, No Laughing Matter, published in 1986. During his battle with the syndrome, Heller also met a nurse who was tending to him at this time, Valerie Humphries, who he would go on to marry. After surviving and recovering from Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is often fatal, Joseph Heller would die of a heart attack on December 12, 1999, at his East Hampton, New York home.