Background

Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York, to first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller. His father, a bakery-truck driver, died after a bungled operation when Heller was only five years old. His mother never learned to speak English well, and the family struggled financially.

Education

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller worked briefly in an insurance office, an experience he later drew upon for the novel Something Happened (1974). He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from New York University in 1948, and a Master of Arts from Columbia University the next year. Following his graduation from Columbia, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Career

Heller enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942. Two years later he was sent to Corsica, where he flew sixty combat missions as a wing bombardier, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit Citation. Heller was discharged from the military in 1945.

In 1950 Heller became an English instructor at Pennsylvania State University. He moved on to become a copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-1956) and Look (1956-1958), as well as a promotion manager for McCall's. He left McCall's in 1961. The office settings of these companies yielded material for the novel Something Happened (1974). In 1961 he began teaching fiction and dramatic writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time Heller was also writing short stories and scripts for film and television as well as working on Catch-22. Although his stories easily found publication, Heller considered them insubstantial and derivative of Ernest Hemingway's works.

After the phenomenal success of Catch-22, Heller quit his job at McCall's and concentrated exclusively on writing fiction and plays. Catch-22 concerns a World War II bombardier named Yossarian who believes his foolish, ambitious, mean-spirited commanding officers are more dangerous than the enemy. In order to avoid flying more missions, Yossarian retreats to a hospital with a mysterious liver complaint, sabotages his plane, and tries to get himself declared insane. At the time of its publication in 1961, Heller's antiwar novel met with modest sales and lukewarm reviews. But by mid-decade, the book began to sell in the American underground, becoming a favored text of the counter-culture.

After the publication of Catch-22, Heller resumed a part-time academic career as an adjunct professor of creative writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. During that time the author wrote the screenplay for ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ by Helen Gurley Brown, ‘Casino Royale’ (1967) and ‘Dirty Dingus Magee’ (1970). In the 1970s, Heller taught creative writing as a distinguished professor at the City College of New York.

Heller's second novel, Something Happened (1974), centers on Bob Slocum, a middle-aged businessman who has a large, successful company but who feels emotionally empty.

Good as Gold (1979) marks Heller's first fictional use of his Jewish heritage and childhood experiences in Coney Island. The protagonist of this novel, Bruce Gold, is an unfulfilled college professor who is writing a book about "the Jewish experience," but he also harbors political ambitions. Offered a high government position after giving a positive review of a book written by the president, Gold accepts, leaves his wife and children, and finds himself immersed in a farcical bureaucracy in which officials speak in a confusing, contradictory language.

Heller's next novel, God Knows (1984), is a retelling of the biblical story of King David, the psalmist of the Old Testament. A memoir in the form of a monologue by David, the text abounds with anachronistic speech, combining the Bible's lyricism with a Jewish-American dialect reminiscent of the comic routines of such humorists as Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen.

In December of 1981, he contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare type of polyneuritis that afflicts the peripheral nervous system. Heller chronicled his medical problems and difficult recovery in No Laughing Matter (1986) with Speed Vogel, a friend who helped him during his illness.

In Picture This (1988), Heller utilizes Rembrandt's painting "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" to draw parallels between ancient Greece, seventeenth-century Holland, and contemporary America.

Heller's first play, We Bombed in New Haven (1967), concerns a group of actors who believe they are portraying an Air Force squadron in an unspecified modern war. The action alternates between scenes where the players act out their parts in the "script" and scenes where they converse among themselves out of "character," expressing dissatisfaction with their roles. This distancing technique, which recalls the work of Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello, alerts the audience to the play's artificiality. Heller also adapted Catch-22 for the stage, but critics generally consider this work inferior to the novel.

In 1991 Heller returned to St. Catherine's as a visiting Fellow, for a term, in 1991 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.

Achievements

• Joseph Heller is particularly known for his novel Catch-22, one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The satirical novel was a popular success, and a film version appeared in 1970. While Heller's later novels have received mixed reviews, Catch-22 continues to be highly regarded as a trenchant satire of the big business of modern warfare. It also ranked 7th on Modern Library’s list of 100 novels of the century. His second novel, ‘Something Happened’, was listed as New York’s Best-selling novels.
  
  Heller’s writings influenced, among others, Robert Altman's comedy M*A*S*H and the subsequent TV series, set in the Korean War.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Catch-22

    (Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the ...)

    1961
  • Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here

    (Now and Then follows Joseph Heller from his fatherless ch...)

    1998
  • No Laughing Matter

    (This book is an inspiring, hilarious memoir of a calamito...)

    1986
  • Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man

    (Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man follows the journey ...)

    2000
  • God Knows

    (Joseph Heller's powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply movin...)

    1984
  • Catch As Catch Can

    (A collection of short stories and other miscellaneous wri...)

  • Something Happened

    (Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventi...)

    1974
  • Good As Gold

    (Good as Gold is a story of children grown up, parents gro...)

    1979
  • Picture This

    (Picture This is an incisive fantasy that digs deeply into...)

    1988
  • Closing Time

    (A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American class...)

    1994
  • We Bombed in New Haven 1967

Politics

"Well, politics for me has become a spectator sport, it has become less and less entertaining for me over the years, so I’m less and less interested in it. I have not voted for perhaps 20 or 25 years. But even as a spectator sport, as I say, like other sports, it’s less and less interesting to me, and I feel it’s-I’ve come to a rather cynical belief that has been held by a large number of American conservatives, beginning with the Constitutional Convention, and philosophers in Victorian England and in Athens; that there are many illusions incorporated in democratic philosophy. They tend to be very pleasing and satisfying, but they are misleading and they are fantasies. And one of them is that the democratic ideal is even possible, that there is such a thing as participatory democracy. I think one of the illusions we have, and it’s very comforting, is that by voting we are participating in government. I maintain that is a delusion, it is a ritual routine. The right to vote, I feel, is indispensable to our contentment; in application it is absolutely useless." (from the show Joseph Heller: The Absurdity of Politics)

Views

Heller’s works present a comic vision of modern society with serious moral implications. A major theme throughout his writing is the conflict that occurs when individuals interact with such powerful institutions as corporations, the military, and the federal government. His protagonists are antiheroes who search for meaning in their lives and struggle to avoid being overwhelmed by those institutions.

Heller's novels have displayed increasing pessimism over the inability of individuals to reverse society's slide toward corruption and degeneration. He renders the chaos and absurdity of contemporary existence through disjointed chronology, anachronistic and oxymoronic language, and repetition of events. In all his work, Heller emphasizes that it is necessary to identify and take responsibility for our social and personal evils and to make beneficial changes in our behavior.

His novel "Catch-22" refers to the ways in which bureaucracies control the people who work for them, and embodies author’s satire of capitalism. Catch-22 is most often interpreted as an antiwar protest novel that foreshadowed the widespread resistance to the Vietnam War. As in Catch-22, We Bombed in New Haven exposes what Heller perceives as the illogic and moral bankruptcy of the United States military. Many critics have also interpreted We Bombed in New Haven as a protest against America's participation in the Vietnam War.

In his novel, Good as Gold, Heller harshly satirizes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a Jew who has essentially forsaken his Jewishness. As a result, the author draws an analogy between the themes of political power lust and corruption with Jewish identity. Similarly, Gold's motives for entering politics are strictly self-aggrandizing, as he seeks financial, sexual, and social rewards. When his older brother dies, however, Gold realizes the importance of his Jewish heritage and family, and decides to leave Washington. Throughout the novel, Heller alternates the narrative between scenes of Gold's large, garrulous Jewish family and the mostly gentile milieu of Washington, employing realism to depict the former and parody to portray the latter.

Heller's novel, God Knows shows the biblical story of King David, who, in an attempt to determine the origin of his despondency near the end of his life, ruminates on the widespread loss of faith and sense of community, the uses of art, and the seeming absence of God.

The novel Picture This meditates on art, money, injustice, the folly of war, and the failures of democracy. Critics questioned whether Picture This should be considered a novel, a work of history, or a political tract.

Quotations: “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

"When I grow up I want to be a little boy."

"Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."

"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

"In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental."

"History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil."

"Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts - and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?"

"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

"Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck."

"I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long."

"There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more."

"Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow."

Personality

For his use of irony, and dark and wise-cracking humor, Heller was often grouped with the authors Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth.

Physical Characteristics: In the early 1980s Heller was stricken with a nerve disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, that left him paralyzed for several months. Though the author became too weak to move and almost too weak to breathe on his own, he eventually regained his strength and recovered from the often fatal disorder.

Quotes from others about the person

• Erica Heller: "My father was and had always been the most playful flirt. My assumption was always that a man who flirted so openly with women in front of his wife and children would have no need for actual affairs, let alone substantive relationships."
  
  Kurt Vonnegut, upon hearing of Heller's death: "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature".
  
  S.C. Barrus: "When John-Joseph Heller's fights became too much of a sure thing, story has it he moved on to more risky fights with grown men and even starved dogs. Though he was scarred often, he was never beaten. But as he brought each opponent to his knees, John-Joseph Heller was also growing up and his vision began to extend further than the ring."
  
  Dave Abrams: "I think it's possible - perhaps even necessary - to find comedy in any war. I mean, look at the brilliant work which was done by Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk - which I haven't read, but have heard was funny)."
  
  Christopher Hitchens: "Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves."

Interests

• reading, History

• Politicians

  John Connally

Connections

After the war, Joseph Heller met Shirley Held at a dance competition. They had two children: Erica, born in 1952, and Ted, born in 1956.

In 1981 he divorced from Shirley and in 1987 married Valerie Humphries, a nurse who had looked after him during his illness.

Father:

Isaac Donald Heller

Mother:

Lena Heller

Wife:

Valerie Humphries

ex-wife:

Shirley Held

Daughter:

Erica Heller

Erica Heller was born in Manhattan on 1 February 1952. That same year, her family moved here to the Apthorp Building, a historic condominium built in 1908 for William Waldorf Astor, former owner of The Observer. An advertising copywriter, novelist and creative consultant, her work has appeared in the New York Observer and on The Huffington Post. She is also the author of the memoir Yossarian Slept Here. She lives in New York. Erica's own book about her father, Yossarian Sleph Here, came out in 2011. Erica was forced to testify against her father when he refused to acknowledge the existence of a mistress to whom he’d once casually introduced her. Their relations never quite recovered. After the trial, Joseph refused to speak to her and returned her letters unopened (a period she characterizes as “the Big Freeze” or “the Mondo Froideur”), and, despite the odd reconciliation, the two weren’t speaking at the time of his death. Ms. Heller is, like her father, a New York University graduate. And one reviewer compared her to Carrie Fisher, an apt analogy. Erica Heller holds little back, offering details of her battle against breast cancer and a brief, unsuccessful marriage.

Son:

Theodore Heller

Friend:

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is acknowledged as a major voice in American literature and applauded for his pungent satirical depictions of modern society. Emphasizing the comic absurdity of the human condition, he frequently depicts characters who search for meaning and order in an inherently meaningless and disorderly universe.

References

• Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller Just One Catch is the first biography of Yossarian’s creator.
  2011
• My Friendship With Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller
  2013
• The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain This critical assessment of Heller's works from his earliest short stories to his most recent work seeks to illustrate the absurdist vision which informs even his plays and occasional essays.
  1989
• Conversations With Joseph Heller Spanning three decades of his literary career, from Catch-22 to comments on the Persian Gulf War, Conversations with Joseph Heller contains a selection of the most significant, informative, and interesting interviews with one of America's foremost novelists.
  1993