Joseph Heller
1 book analyzed
Biography
Joseph Heller (1923-1999) was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. His father died when Heller was five. He worked various jobs before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps at nineteen. He flew sixty combat missions as a bombardier over Corsica and Italy, including missions over Avignon and Ferrara. After the war, he attended New York University and Oxford on the GI Bill, then Columbia, then worked in advertising and magazine editing for years. He began writing Catch-22 in 1953, working on it at nights and on weekends while employed full-time. The novel took eight years to complete and was published in 1961. He never wrote anything as culturally significant again, though he published six more novels before his death. His 1974 memoir Something Happened is considered his second most important work.