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 absu...
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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 to...
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Jospeh Heller was born 1 May 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. His father died in 1927. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Force. He was stationed in Co...
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Despite his relatively small output, Joseph Heller is considered a major contemporary author. His reputation rests principally on his first book, the experimental antiwar novel Catch-22, one of the mo...
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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...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
No salute is due Joseph Heller's rather self-indulgent anti-war and anti-universal indifference play, We Bombed in New Haven, a belated foray into Pirandellism cov...
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Critical Essay by Mike Frank
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...
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Critical Essay by Leonard Michaels
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 st...
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In the following interview, which took place on October 24, 1996, Heller discusses his themes, influences, and techniques for writing his novels.
Despite the fact that he has also composed two memo...
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In the following review, Glass finds Now and Then lacking as autobiography.
Now and Then is a detailed guide to subway travel and cheap food in 1930s Coney Island, New York. It begins in Coney Isla...
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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 th...
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American playwright (b. Oct. 18, 1950, Brooklyn,
N.Y.
—d. Jan. 30, 2006,
New York, N.Y.
), probed, with humour and sensibility, the predicament facing educated women who came of age in the ...
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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 w...
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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, leng...
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Politics makes strange bedfellows. Everyone knows that. This campaign makes for strange bed-hopping. (How post-modern.) Hillary haters find themselves cheering Sen. Ted Kennedy to rally Democrats b...
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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 care...
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“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...
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“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...
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Absurdistan is the sort of novel that, if mishandled, could make for a truly fabulous mess. As in Gary Shteyngart’s debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, we find ourselves immersed i...
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Absurdistan is the sort of novel that, if mishandled, could make for a truly fabulous mess. As in Gary Shteyngart’s debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, we find ourselves immersed i...
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Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Critical Essay by John Simon
Joseph Heller's Career
Wasserstein, Wendy
