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 Corsica where he flew sixty missions as a wing bombardier. He married Shirley Held on 3 September 1945. They have two children, Erica Jill and Theodor Michael.

After the war, Heller attended the University of Southern California for a year before transferring to New York University in 1946. He received his B.A. in 1948 and his M.A. from Columbia a year later, where his master's thesis was "The Pulitzer Prize Plays: 1917-1935." After spending a year at Oxford on a Fulbright Scholarship, he returned to teach at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952. He spent the following four years in the same position as an advertising manager for Time, the next two years in the same position for Look, and...