Joseph Heller taught creative writing at Yale and CCNY

Person: Joseph Heller
Lived: 1923–1999
Field: Novelist
From: American

The story

Joseph Heller began his working life as a teacher. After studying on the G.I. Bill at New York University and Columbia, and spending a year at Oxford as a Fulbright scholar, he taught English composition to first-year students at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952. He then moved into advertising, working for Time, Look and McCall's while writing fiction at home.

Before Catch-22 became a bestseller he also took on script work to support himself, contributing to the television comedy McHale's Navy and working on screenplays. Success as a novelist did not end his interest in the classroom. After the publication of Catch-22, he resumed a part-time academic career as an adjunct professor of creative writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1960s he taught fiction and dramatic writing at Yale, where he also wrote his play We Bombed in New Haven, first staged by the Yale School of Drama in December 1967.

In the 1970s he joined the English department of the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York, as a distinguished writer teaching creative writing. It was a public college in the city where he had grown up, and he taught there while working on his later novels.

Heller had a distinctive method that he could pass on to students. He would not begin a story until he had imagined both a first and a last line. The first sentence, he said, usually came to him without any conscious preparation. Within an hour he would sketch a plot and characters, then write one paragraph at a time until he had three or four handwritten pages, which he spent hours reworking. Only when a novel was about a third finished did he see clearly what it was about, and then he would rewrite everything before going on.

By teaching at both private and public universities, Heller shared the craft behind one of the century's most influential novels with a new generation of American writers, showing them that patient revision mattered as much as inspiration.

Why it matters

By teaching at public and private universities alike, Heller shared his craft with a new generation of American writers.

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.

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Joseph Heller

1923–1999 · Novelist

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