Joseph Heller was the son of poor Jewish parents from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; at the age of eleven, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland. He sent it to New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to Italy, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home he "felt like a hero... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."
Heller was born in Coney Island (Brooklyn, NY) to poor Jewish Russian immigrants.
After high-school, Mr. Heller apprenticed a blacksmith.
Heller served in the US Army Air Corps during World War II. He flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier.
After he graduated college (under the GI Bill), Mr. Heller spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Oxford.
Heller taught composition at Penn State and fiction at Yale.
One of Mr. Heller’s jobs, after teaching, was as a copywriter at a small ad agency. One of his co-workers was Mary Higgins Clark.
The initial chapter of Catch-22 was published in 1955 in New World Writing, issue 7. It was titled Catch-18. The title was changed because Leon Uris’ novel, Mila 18, came out at the same time.
Heller’s agent sold the unfinished manuscript of Catch-22 to Simon and Schuster. The publisher paid $750 and promised another $750 when the manuscript will be delivered 3 years later. Mr. Heller missed the deadline by 5 years or so.
Two of Mr. Heller’s most known quotes are “peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it” And “What does a sane man do in an insane society?
Today the term Catch-22 means “a dilemma with no easy way out”.
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