Joseph Heller has established himself as a major satirist in the field of contemporary American fiction. A new phrase was added to the American lexicon from the title of his first novel Catch-22 (1961). The term "catch-22" has become accepted in...

Joseph Heller (1923-1999) was a popular and respected writer whose first and best-known novel, Catch-22 (1961), is considered a classic of the post-World War II era. Presenting human existence as absurd and fragmented, this irreverent, witty novel...

When Joseph Heller learned that the New York Times Book Review's response to his first novel was negative, he and his family were terribly depressed. "Waiting for that review to come out," he later told David Streitfeld of New York, "I didn't think any...

Like his friend Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to baby boomers _ though he was raised in an earlier time. The president he mourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war was World War II, not Vietnam.Nearly 40 when the...

Within the past year, three of the most famous authors to emerge after World War II have died: Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Their deaths all resulted in front-page stories, lengthy appreciations and ongoing discussions about their place in American letters.No writer was...

Part pooh-bah, part pontiff, for some 50 years Leo Lerman ruled Manhattan’s cultural roost from a host of journalistic redoubts, including Mademoiselle, Vogue and Vanity Fair, ending his career as an über-editorial advisor at Condé Nast Publications. He died at 80 on Aug. 22, 1994....

“Injustice rules,” cries the Random House flier. No, they’re not vexed by the spreading loom of terror, the unhappy history of Kashmir or even the legal process in California (all of which figure in Shalimar the Clown). The publisher’s alarm is more local: “The Swedes...

In the following interview, which took place on October 24, 1996, Heller discusses his themes, influences, and techniques for writing his novels.

Heller makes it clear that the real enemy, the source of the true danger, is that principle which can allow Milo so glibly to overlook Nazi crimes against human life. And that principle, as the text makes abundantly clear, is an economic one. For Milo contract, and the entire economic structure and ethical system that it embodies and represents, is more sacred than human life. (pp. 77-8) The most important manifestation of this thanatotic American morality, important because it extends the responsibility fr...

In his diary Kafka asks, "What have I in common with Jews?" Immediately he answers, "I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." Thus, failure to identify with his people inspires a joke about failure to identify with himself. The same failure, and the same joke extremely elaborated, describes much of Joseph Heller's third novel, "Good as Gold." As the title boasts, "Good as Gold&...

Ever since the early success of his novel Catch 22, Joseph Heller has been recognized as one of the top 20 American writers in history. The success of the book was supported by the social tone of the year of its publication: 1961.