- Person
- Joseph Heller
- Lived
- 1923–1999
- Field
- Novelist
- From
- American
The story
For much of his career Joseph Heller wrote about soldiers and businessmen. Catch-22 (1961) satirised military bureaucracy, and Something Happened (1974) explored the inner emptiness of a corporate manager. Later he turned to his own Jewish background, which he had grown up with as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
His 1979 novel Good as Gold marked his first fictional use of his Jewish heritage and his childhood in Coney Island. Its hero, Bruce Gold, is an English professor writing a book about the Jewish experience who is tempted by a post in Washington. The novel moves between the lively world of Gold's large, talkative Jewish family, drawn realistically, and a satirical portrait of political life. In the end, after a death in the family, Gold recognises the importance of his heritage and his family and turns away from Washington.
Five years later Heller went much further back, to the Hebrew Bible. God Knows (1984) is told by King David on his deathbed, looking back over his extraordinary life. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes David's voice in the novel as shrewd, world-weary and flamboyant. Heller mixed the lyricism of the Bible with a modern Jewish-American idiom that critics compared to the comic routines of Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. The ageing king reflects on faith, community, the uses of art and his sense that God no longer speaks to him.
The result brought one of the great figures of Jewish history to life for modern readers, combining biblical drama with Heller's trademark comedy. It also showed that the questions Heller had always asked about power, loyalty and meaning could be posed through the story of Israel's most famous king.
Heller kept returning to his roots. His 1998 memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, revisited his childhood in Brooklyn as the son of a deliveryman and described some of the inspirations for Catch-22. He finished his last novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, shortly before his death in 1999. Taken together, his later books gave American readers a witty and searching view of Jewish identity and of the biblical tradition that shaped it.
Why it matters
Heller's later novels brought Jewish experience and biblical history to a wide modern audience with humour and insight.
About Joseph Heller
Coney Island-born bombardier turned novelist whose Catch-22 skewered the absurdity of war and bureaucracy – and gave the English language a phrase for every no-win situation.
More about Joseph Heller
- Joseph Heller gave English the phrase 'Catch-22'Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 gave English, and other languages, a lasting term for a no-win dilemma created by absurd rules.
- Joseph Heller wrote about beating a paralysing illnessAfter Guillain-Barré syndrome left him paralysed in 1981, Joseph Heller recovered and co-wrote No Laughing Matter about the friends who helped him.
- Joseph Heller taught creative writing at Yale and CCNYAfter Catch-22, Joseph Heller taught creative writing at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, and later at the City College of New York.
- Joseph Heller wrote an anti-war play during VietnamJoseph Heller's play We Bombed in New Haven, written in 1967, carried an anti-war message to Yale and then to Broadway during the Vietnam War.
Sources
- Joseph Heller Encyclopedia.com
- Joseph Heller Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.