Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 - December 12, 1999) was an American novelist best known for writing Catch-22.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Coney Island. During World War II he flew sixty missions in B-25s in North Africa and Italy. After the war he studied at the University of Southern California, New York University, Columbia and Oxford and began to write short fiction. He taught composition at Penn State for two years and in 1952 returned to New York and worked as a writer in advertising for Time, Look, and McCall's. In 1953 he wrote the beginning of "Catch 18" which, in 1961, was to be published as the famous Catch-22 As well as novels he also wrote stage plays, screenplays, short stories, articles, memoirs and reviews.

Also wrote:

• Good As Gold
• God Knows
• Closing Time
• Something Happened
• Picture This
• Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man
• Now And Then

There is a Joseph Heller Archive University at South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library: http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/amlit/heller.html

Quotations

• "When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"