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&...

In the following review, Glass finds Now and Then lacking as autobiography.

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 covering ideological and technical ground that is already flyspecked with footprints. Actually, the play has flunked out of every school it attended. At the Pirandello Academy it failed to master the basic precept that there can be no easy answers: here, when Sergeant Henderson unmistakably dies before our eyes and Captain Starkey sends his ow...