Catch-22 (Heller)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1923
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Died—December 12, 1999
• Where—East Hamton, New York
• Education—University of Southern California, New York University;
   M.A., Columbia University


Joseph Heller was an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English language to refer to a vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty.

Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.

Early years
Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. At least one scholar suggests that Heller knew that he wanted to become a writer, after recalling that he received a children's version of the Iliad when he was ten.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. His unit was the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning.... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it."

On his return home he "felt like a hero.... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."  ("Milk runs" were combat missions, but mostly uneventful due to a lack of intense opposition from enemy anti-aircraft artillery or fighters).

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU on the G.I. Bill. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Following his graduation, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine's College, Oxford (1949–50) and, after returning home, he taught composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years (1950–52). He also taught fiction and dramatic writing at Yale.

He then briefly worked for Time Inc., before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. The story nearly won the "Atlantic First."

He was married to Shirley Held from 1945 to 1981. They had two children.

Catch-22
While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines

It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, [Yossarian] fell madly in love with him.

Within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters, the plot, and the tone that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent. He did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as "Catch-18" in Issue 7 of New World Writing.

Although he originally did not intend the story to be longer than a novelette, Heller was able to add enough substance to the plot that he felt it could become his first novel. When he was one-third done with the work, his agent whose assistant, Candida Donadio, liked it and sent it to publishers. Heller was not particularly attached to the work, and decided that he would not finish it if publishers were not interested. The work was soon purchased by Simon and Schuster, who gave him US $750 and promised him an additional $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. Heller missed his deadline by four to five years but, after eight years of thought, delivered the novel to his publisher.

The finished novel describes the wartime experiences of Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian. Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat missions, but the military bureaucracy is always able to find a way to make him stay. As Heller observed,

Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts—and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?

Heller has also commented that "peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."

Just before publication, the novel's title was changed to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris' new novel, Mila 18. The novel was published in hardback in 1961 to mixed reviews, with the Chicago Sun-Times calling it "the best American novel in years" while other critics derided it as "disorganized, unreadable, and crass." It sold only 30,000 copies in the US hardback in its first year of publication. Reaction was very different in the UK, where, within one week of its publication, the novel was number one on the bestseller lists.

Once it was released in paperback in October 1962, however, Catch-22 caught the imaginations of many baby boomers, who identified with the novel's anti-war sentiments. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States. The novel's title became a buzzword for a dilemma with no easy way out. Now considered a classic, the book was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the century.

The movie rights to the novel were purchased in 1962, and, combined with his royalties, made Heller a millionaire. The film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, and Orson Welles, was released in 1970.

Other works
Shortly after Catch-22 was published, Heller thought of an idea for his next novel, which would become Something Happened, but did not act on it for two years. In the meantime he focused on scripts, completing the final screenplay for the movie adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, as well as a television comedy script that eventually aired as part of McHale's Navy.

In 1969, Heller wrote a play called We Bombed in New Haven. It delivered an anti-war message while discussing the Vietnam War. It was originally produced by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School, with Stacy Keach in the starring role. After a slight revision, it was published by Alfred A. Knopf and then debuted on Broadway, starring Jason Robards.

Something Happened, was finally published in 1974. Critics were enthusiastic about the book, and both its hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Heller wrote another five novels, each of which took him several years to complete. One of them, Closing Time, revisited many of the characters from Catch-22 as they adjusted to post-war New York. All of the novels sold respectably well, but could not duplicate the success of his debut. Told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22, Heller famously responded, "Who has?"

Heller maintained that he did not "have a philosophy of life, or a need to organize its progression. My books are not constructed to "say anything." Only when he was almost one-third finished with the novel would he gain a clear vision of what it should be about. At that point, with the idea solidified, he would rewrite all that he had finished and then continue to the end of the story. The finished version of the novel would often not begin or end with the sentences he had originally envisioned, although he usually tried to include the original opening sentence somewhere in the text.

Teaching
In the 1970s Heller taught creative writing at the City College of New York. After the publication of Catch-22, Heller resumed a part-time academic career as a teacher of creative writing at Yale University and at the University of Pennsylvania.

Illness
In December, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that was to leave him temporarily paralyzed. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of Mount Sinai Medical Hospital for a month and was transferred in January (1982 to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. His illness and recovery are recounted at great length in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter, which contains alternating chapters by Heller and his good friend Speed Vogel. The book reveals the assistance and companionship Heller received from a number of his good friends—Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and George Mandel among them.

Heller eventually made a substantial recovery. He later married Valerie Humphries, one of the nurses who helped him become well again.

Later years
In 1991 Heller returned to St. Catherine's at Oxford as a visiting Fellow for a term and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.

He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in December, 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature."

Catch-22 controversy
In April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to The Sunday Times regarding "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" in Catch-22 and The Sky is a Lonely Place (Face of a Hero in the U.S.), published in 1951 by Louis Falstein. Falstein's novel was available two years before Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 (1953) while he was a student at Oxford. The Times stated:

Both 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.

Stating he had never read Falstein's novel, or heard of him, Heller said: "My book came out in 1961.... I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/4/2014.)