A boy from Coney Island
Joseph Heller was born on 1 May 1923 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia, Isaac Donald Heller and Lena Heller. His father drove a delivery truck for a wholesale bakery. When Joseph was about five, his father died after an operation, accounts differ on whether a bleeding ulcer or a bungled procedure was to blame, and his mother took in boarders to make ends meet. An older half-brother, Lee, from his father’s first marriage, became something of a surrogate father.
Coney Island, with its boardwalk, amusement parks and crowded immigrant streets, stayed with him for life; decades later he called his memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. He was a mischievous pupil who devoured adventure books, and at about ten, after a cousin gave him a children’s version of the Iliad, he decided he would be a writer. 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, a messenger boy and a filing clerk.
Sixty missions
In 1942, aged nineteen, Heller enlisted in the US Army Air Forces. Two years later he was sent to the Italian theatre, flying from Corsica as a bombardier on B-25 medium bombers with the 488th Bombardment Squadron of the 340th Bomb Group. He flew sixty combat missions and left the service in 1945 as a first lieutenant.
He later admitted that the war had been ‘fun in the beginning’, with a feeling that there was something glorious about it, and he insisted with typical deflation that many of his missions had been ‘milk runs’. But not all were. The fear, the arithmetic of survival and the gulf between the men risking their lives and the officers managing them became the raw material of his great novel.
Student, teacher, ad man
After the war, the G.I. Bill paid for his education. He studied English at the University of Southern California and New York University, graduating from NYU in 1948, and earned an MA from Columbia in 1949. A Fulbright scholarship took him to St Catherine’s at Oxford for a year, after which he taught English composition at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952. He married Shirley Held in 1945; they had two children, Erica and Theodore.
Heller then went into magazines and advertising, writing promotional copy for Time, Look and McCall’s. His first short story had appeared in The Atlantic in 1948. At his desk in an office by day and at home by night, he was quietly building a book.
Catch-22
One morning in 1953, Heller later recalled, an opening line came to him: it was love at first sight, the first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him. Within a day he had imagined characters, plot and tone; within a week he had a first chapter, published in 1955 as ‘Catch-18’ in the anthology New World Writing. Simon & Schuster bought the unfinished novel for an advance of $750, with another $750 promised on delivery. It took Heller about eight years to finish.
Just before publication in 1961, the title was changed to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s new novel Mila 18. The book follows Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier on a Mediterranean island who wants only to stay alive, and the military machine that keeps raising the number of missions he must fly. The ‘catch’ is a rule that any airman who asks to be grounded for insanity proves, by asking, that he is sane and must keep flying. ‘Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy’ Heller said; the real question was what a sane man does in an insane society.
American reviews were mixed, one critic found it ‘the best American novel in years’, others called it disorganised and crass, and it sold about 30,000 hardback copies in its first year. In Britain it went to number one within a week. Once the paperback appeared in 1962, a generation growing up under the shadow of the Vietnam War seized on it. Catch-22 eventually sold some ten million copies in the United States alone.
A phrase for the modern world
Few novels change a language. ‘Catch-22’ became a standard term in English, and in other languages, for a no-win dilemma created by contradictory rules, the kind of trap every citizen meets in a bureaucracy, a workplace or a war. The Modern Library ranked the book seventh among the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and the US Air Force Academy has used it to help future officers recognise the dehumanising side of bureaucracy.
The film rights, sold in 1962, together with royalties made Heller a millionaire. Mike Nichols’s film version, with Alan Arkin as Yossarian and Orson Welles in the cast, appeared in 1970. In 1998 a reader pointed out similarities between Catch-22 and Louis Falstein’s 1950s air-war novel Face of a Hero; Heller said he had never read it or heard of its author.
Life after a masterpiece
Heller wrote screenplays, including Sex and the Single Girl, and an anti-war play about Vietnam, We Bombed in New Haven (1967), first staged at Yale and later on Broadway. His second novel, Something Happened (1974), a bleak inner monologue of a corporate executive, took him more than a decade; critics admired it and both its hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Later came Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994), which revisited Yossarian and his comrades in old age, and the posthumous Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, about a famous novelist struggling to match his first success.
None repeated the phenomenon of Catch-22, and Heller faced the comparison with wry good humour. He also taught creative writing at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and the City College of New York.
Jewish voices in his fiction
Heller was raised in a Jewish immigrant world but was not religious; he described himself as an agnostic. Catch-22 barely touches on Jewish identity. It was only in Good as Gold (1979) that he turned directly to his heritage and his Coney Island childhood. Its hero, Bruce Gold, is a Jewish English professor writing a book about ‘the Jewish experience’ while chasing a job in Washington; the novel mixes family comedy around the dinner table with savage satire of Henry Kissinger as a Jew in power who seemed to have left his Jewishness behind.
In God Knows (1984), Heller went further back, letting the biblical King David narrate his own life, wives, wars, sons and grievances, in a wise-cracking Jewish-American voice. Both books showed that the satirist of military bureaucracy could also turn his comic anger on assimilation, ambition and the oldest Jewish stories.
Paralysis and recovery
In December 1981 Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a disorder that left him temporarily paralysed. He spent weeks in intensive care at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York before moving to a rehabilitation institute in January 1982, and eventually made a full recovery. Friends including Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo and Dustin Hoffman rallied round, and he and his friend Speed Vogel wrote about the ordeal, with alternating chapters, in No Laughing Matter (1986). His first marriage had ended in divorce; in 1987 he married Valerie Humphries, one of the nurses who had cared for him.
Death and legacy
Joseph Heller died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, Long Island, on 12 December 1999, aged 76, shortly after finishing his last novel. His friend Kurt Vonnegut called his death a calamity for American literature. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 and 1975.
Heller’s achievement was to make readers laugh at the most frightening institutions of modern life, and then feel the horror underneath the laughter. Catch-22 remains a staple of school and university reading lists, and its title remains the shorthand for the absurd rule that traps everyone who meets it. The son of a Brooklyn bakery driver gave the world one of the indispensable words for understanding power.
Sources & further reading
Joseph Heller, Wikipedia · Joseph Heller: Literary giant, BBC News (1999) · Joseph Heller, Encyclopedia.com (compiled biographies) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.