Joseph Heller

Born on 1 May 1923 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the son of poor Russian Jewish immigrants Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, Joseph Heller grew up within earshot of the ocean and the roller coasters. His father died after a failed ulcer operation when Heller was five. As a teenager, he wrote a story about the Soviet invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, he worked as a blacksmith’s apprentice and filing clerk before joining the Army Air Corps in 1942 at the age of nineteen. He flew sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier over Italy , missions he later described as “largely milk runs,” though one terrifying sortie over Avignon, in which his pilot was wounded and the plane nearly went down, would seed the novel that consumed the next decade of his life. After the war, he studied at NYU and Columbia on the G.I. Bill, spent a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and worked as an advertising copywriter while writing at home. One morning in 1953, the first two lines came to him: “It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Yossarian fell madly in love with him.” Eight years later, Catch-22 (1961) appeared, its title originally “Catch-18” until Leon Uris published Mila 18. The novel sold only 30,000 hardcover copies in its first American year but became a phenomenon in paperback, eventually selling over ten million copies and giving the English language a new term for any paradox from which there is no escape. Something Happened (1974), a bleak corporate monologue, divided critics; Closing Time (1994) returned to Yossarian. Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome in 1981 and wrote about his recovery in No Laughing Matter (1986). He died on 12 December 1999 at his home in East Hampton, of a heart attack, at seventy-six.