His father died as a result of a bungled operation when Heller was five, and his friend and journalist Barbara Gelb feels that this event caused a psychic wound, revealing itself in the recurrence of death as a central focus in Heller's writing. Looking back on the Coney Island neighborhood where his family lived, Heller has always recalled those years with nostalgia, and indeed the Coney Island Luna Park must have had a formative influence on Heller's perception of comic spectacle and the streetwise banter of the showmen. In his 1962 article "Coney Island: The Fun Is Over" Heller recorded his memories of the barkers who created a "setup where the customer could never win." The confidence tricks recur on a small scale within different contexts in Heller's novels.
In his youth Heller was an avid reader of Jerome Weidman's fiction of New York's Lower East Side. At the age of thirteen, he briefly held a job as a Western Union messenger boy, an experience he drew on for his 1962 story "World Full of Great Cities." In his teens he tried his hand at writing short stories while holding brief jobs as a file clerk in a casualty insurance company, a blacksmith's helper in a naval yard, and a shipping file clerk.
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