Joseph Heller Biography and List of Works

American writer, who gained world fame with his satirical, anti-war novel CATCH-22 (1961), set in the World War II Italy. The book influenced Robert Altman's comedy M*A*S*H, and the subsequent long-running TV series, set in the Korean War.

"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 cahpter from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, under a pseudonym.)"
(from Now and Then, 1998)

Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of poor Jewish parents. His Russian-born father, who was a bakery truck driver, died in 1927. 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-52 bombardier. In 1949 Heller received his M.A. from Columbia University.He was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford in 1949-50. Heller worked as a teacher at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52), copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-56), Look (1956-58), 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.

His first stories Heller sold already during his student times. They were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly and Esquire. In 1953 he started working on Catch-22, which have enjoyed a steady sale since its publication in 1961. The novel did not arouse much attention until 1962, when its English publication received critical praise. After writing Catch-22 Heller worked on several Hollywood screenplays, such as Sex and the Single Girl, Casino Royale and Dirty Dingus Magee, and contributed to the TV show "McHale's Navy" under the pseydonym Max Orange.

"A lifetime of experience had trained him never to toss away a page he had written, no matter how clumsy, until he had gone over it again for improvement, or had at least stored it in a folder for safekeeping or recorded the words on his computer."
(from Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, 2000)

In the 1960s Heller was involved with the anti-Vietnam war protest movement. Heller waited 13 years before publishing his next novel, SOMETHING HAPPENED (1974). It portrayed a corporation man Bob Slocum who lives in a world where everyone is permanently afraid of someone else. Slocum does not share Yossarian's rebelliousness but cynically resigns himself to a success he secretly despises. Heller's play-within-a-play, WE BOMBED IN NEW HAVEN (1968), was written in part to express his protest against the Vietnam War. It was produced on Broadway and ran for 86 performances.

Heller's later novels include GOOD AS GOLD (1979), both continuation and parody of the tradition of the Jewish novel in America, where the protagonist Bruce Gold tries to regain the Jewishness he has lost. Readers hailed the work as a return to puns and verbal games familiar from Heller's first novel. GOD KNOWS (1984) was a modern version of the story of King David and an allegory of what it is like for a Jew to survive in a hostile world. David has decided that he has been given one of the best parts of the Bible. "I have suicide, regicide, patricide, homicide, fratricide, infanticide, adultery, incest, hanging, and more decapitations than just Saul's."

NO LAUGHING MATTER (1986), written with Speed Vogel, was a surprisingly cheerful account of Heller's experience as a victim of Guillain-Barré syndrome. During his recuperation Heller was visited among others by Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and Mel Brooks. CLOSING TIME (1994) is a sequel to Catch-22, depicting the current lives of its heroes. Yossarian is now 40 years older and as preoccupied with death as in the earlier novel. NOW AND THEN (1998) is Heller's autobiographical work, evocation of his boyhood home, Brooklyn's Coney Island in the 1920s and 30's.

"It has struck me since - it couldn't have done so then - that in Catch-22 and in all my subsequent novels, and also in my one play, the resolution at the end of what narrative there is evolves from the death of someone other than the main character."
(from Now and Then)

Heller had two children by his first marriage. His divorce was recounted in No Laughing Matter. In 1989 Heller married Valerie Humphries, a nurse he met while ill. Heller died of a heart attack at his home on Long Island in December 13,1999. His last novel, PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN (2000) was about a successful novelist who seeks an inspiration for his book.

CATCH-22: The protagonist in the book is Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an airstrip on the fictitious island off the coast of Italy during WW II. In the lunatic cast of characters are the conman Milo Minderbinder, company mess officer, who creates a successful black-market business, Major Major, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who wants to turn his men into perfect parade ground robots, Chief White Halfoat, whose family is constantly chased and evicted by oil companies, and mail clerk Wintergreen, who is really running the war.

Jossarian, lead bombardier of the 256th squadron, struggles to retain his sanity and hopes to get a medical discharge by pretending to be insane. The story centres on the USAF regulation, which suggests that to fly dangerous combat missions must be considered insane, but if the airmen seek to be relieved on grounds of mental reasons, the request proves their sanity. Finally, after his friends are killed or missing, Yossarian decides to desert to Sweden. The non-chronological, fragmented narrative underlines the pointless series of missions and displacement that war produces.

The publication of Catch-22 signalled a more experimental approach to the war novel, anticipating such works as Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Heller also expressed the emerging rebelliousness of the Vietnam generation, and the dissatisfaction of the life in a standardized mass society governed by corporate capitalism and irrational logic. - Louis Falstein's novel The Sky is a Lonely Place, which was published earlier, depicts combat missions above Mediterranean during WW II. Some characters are similar, too.

For further reading: Tilting at Morality by David M. Craig (1997); From Here to Absurdity by Stephen W. Potts (1995); Conversations with Joseph Heller, ed. by Adam J. Sorkin (1993); Understanding Joseph Heller by Sanford Pinsker (1991); Joseph Heller by Judit Ruderman (1991); The Fiction of Joseph Heller by David Sed (1989); Joseph Heller by Robert Merrill (1987); Joseph Heller's Catch-22 by Rose Kam, Joseph L. Heller (1985, paperback); Crititical Essays on Joseph Heller, ed. by James Nagel (1984) - See also: other WW II pilots and writers: James Dickey, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

M*A*S*H - USA television series (1872-83, 250 x 30 m/1 x 150 m), starring Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, Loretta Swift, Jamie Farr, McLean Stevenson, Larry Linville, Mike Farrell, Gary Burghoff, David Ogden Stiers, Harry Morgan, George Morgan, William Christopher. Developed from Robert Altman's hit movie about the misadventures of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. - The scriptwriter Larry Gelbart left in 1976, and Alan Alda took over as one of principal writers and directors of the show. The two-and-a-half-hour special 'Good-bye, Farewell and Amen' ended the series in 1983. A sequel, After Mash, presented several of the unit adjusting to civilian life. Richard Hornberger, under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, wrote the original M*A*S*H novel. He did not watch the TV version because of its liberal sensibilities.

CATCH-22, (1961)