Catch-22 (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and grew up in Coney Island. This oceanside town had a large population of Russian Jewish immigrants, including Heller's parents, and was known for its amusement park. Heller's biting sense of humor may have been influenced by growing up in this somewhat surrealistic, carnival-like neighborhood.

After his 1941 high school graduation, Heller worked in an insurance office for a short time. The next year, 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and in 1944, the year in which Catch-22 is set, Heller was stationed on the island of Corsica (located in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coasts of France and Italy). There he was a bombardier who flew sixty combat missions, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit citation. After the war ended in 1945, Heller married Shirley Held and went to college, eventually earning a B.A. in English from New York University and an M.A. from Columbia University. He then attended Oxford University in England as a Fulbright Scholar for a year, then moved to Pennsylvania, where he taught English at Pennsylvania State University for two years. Heller then changed careers, working as an advertising copywriter from 1952 to 1961 at such popular magazines as Time, Look, and McCall's. These jobs influenced his 1974 novel Something Happened. While working as a copywriter, Heller wrote short stories and television and film screenplays, and began writing Catch-22.

The first chapter of Catch-22 was originally published in an anthology in 1955, and the entire work was published in 1961. After the novel's great success, Heller quit his copywriting job and concentrated on writing. In December 1981, he contracted a rare disease of the nervous system, which he wrote about in his book No Laughing Matter (1986) with his friend Speed Vogel. Heller has written other novels, many of which employ the plot of an individual battling against a powerful institution such as the military, government, or a corporation. These works capture Heller's basic pessimism about the power of the individual to fight society's corruption. Heller has also written a play, We Bombed in New Haven, about a group of actors who are supposed to play an Air Force squadron in an unnamed war, but who question their roles in the play. Heller also adapted Catch-22 for the stage, but critics consider the book much better than the play. To date, none of the author's writings have achieved the acclaim or success of Catch-22, which is still considered a modern classic for its black humor and absurd portrayal of war. Heller continues to write, and lives in New York.