Joseph Heller Biography and latest books by Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born on 1 May, 1923. He was an American novelist who was known for his satirical writings. He was also a playwright and a short story writer. He is known famously for his work in Catch-22 which was a very influential novel set during the Second World War. Joseph Heller is known as one of the best satirist post the Second World War.

Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, he was the son of a poor Jewish couple from Russia. As a child Heller loved to write. While he was still a teen, he wrote a short story which was based on the invasion of Finland by Russia. However, when he sent this short story to New York Daily News, they rejected it. He Graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in the year 19 41 and worked as an apprentice for a blacksmith the following year. He joined the U.S Army Air Corps in the year 1942 when he was just 19 years old.

Joseph Heller joined University of Southern California and NYU after the war and took up English as his major. Following his graduation from these two universities he joined Columbia University where he earned his Masters in English. After earning his Masters Degree he joined St. Catherine’s College as a Fulbright Scholar. For two years he taught composition at Pennsylvania State University after he returned home. He worked with Mary Higgins Clark while he was working as a copywriter at an advertising agency.

Joseph Keller began working on his first novel Catch-22 during the 1950s which was originally called Catch-18. He however changed the name on his novel to Catch-22 in order to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s novel, Mila 18. Catch-22 was published in the year 1961 and it received mixed reviews. While the Chicago Sun-Times called it “the best American nave in years”, critics considered it to be “disorganized, unreadable and crass”. In its first year of publication in hardback, only 30,000 copies were sold in the United States. But after the publication of Catch-22 in paperback in October 1962, it sold over 10 million copies in the United States alone. The novel talked about the life of the American soldiers during the Second World War. The main protagonist being Captain John Yossarin. The novel came in the seventh place on the list of Modern Library’s list of top 100 novels of the century.

In the year 1962 Heller became a millionaire after selling off the movie rights to one of the production house. The movie version which was directed by Mike Nicholas was released in the year 1970 which starred Alan Arkin, Jon Voight and Orson Welles.

In the year 1969, he wrote a play called We Bombed in New Haven. Before working on this, he had also written the screenplay for the movie Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. Besides this he also wrote the script for television comedy, McHale’s Navy.

Heller’s next novel Something Happened was published in the year 1974. The novel reached number one spot on The New York Times Bestseller list. Following this he wrote four more novels one of which was Closing Time. The characters from Catch-22 were portrayed again to show their adjustment post-war.

In the year 1981, on December 13, he was diagnosed with Gullian-Barre’ Syndrome which left him paralyzed temporarily. He eventually recovered from it. However on December 12, 1999, Heller died of a heart attack in East Hampton, Long Island after completing his last novel Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man.

Submitted by Precious Pheirim