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 as a bombadier with the Twelfth Air Force in B-25s in North Africa and Italy. From 1948 to 1950, he studied at the University of Southern California, New York University, Columbia and Oxford, where he was a Fulbright scholar. During this time he 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. In addition to novels, he wrote stage plays, screenplays, short stories, articles, memoirs and reviews.
Heller also wrote:
- Something Happened (1974)
- Good As Gold (1979)
- God Knows (1984)
- Picture This (1988)
- Closing Time (1994)
- Now And Then (1999)
- Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man (2000)