Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 - December 12, 1999) was an American satirist best remembered for writing the satiric World War II classic Catch-22. A literary equipment established inside that number 1 novel continued in his more books. A book was part according to Heller's have lives & influenced among others Robert Altman's comedy M*A*S*H, and a subsequent long-running off TV series, placed in the Korean War. A sentence "catch-22" has entered the English language to signify a there is no-win situation, particularly of these created by a law, regulation or even circumstance.

Biography
Heller was natural within Brooklyn, New York, as a boy of unfortunate Jewish parents. His Russian-born father, world health organization was the bakeshop trucker, died inside 1927. Fallowing graduating from either Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Click. He was stationed around Corsica, in which he flew Sixty combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. Inside 1949 Heller received his M.The. from either Columbia University. He was the Fulbright scholar at Oxford University in 1949-1950. Heller worked as a teacher at Pennsylvania State University (1950-52), copywriter for the magazines Time (1952-1956) and Look (1956-1958), and promotion manager for McCall's. He left McCall's around 1961 to teach fiction and spectacular writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Catch-22 (1961-1970)
"All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight." (from either Catch-22)

His number 1 stories Heller sold already in the period of his student days. It were published around such magazines when Atlantic Monthly & Esquire. In the early 1950s he started working in Catch-22. At that period Heller was listed as the copywriter at a little ad agency. Virtually all of the book he wrote in the vestibule of the West Prevent Avenue flat. "As I've said and repeat, I wrote the first chapter in longhand one morning in 1953, hunched over my desk at the advertising agency (from ideas and words that had leaped into my mind only the night before); the chapter was published in the quarterly New World Writing #7 in 1955 under the title "Catch-18." (I received twenty-five dollars. The same issue carried a chapter from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, under a pseudonym.)" (from either Okay, so, 1998) A novel went largely unnoticed until 1962, when its English publication received critical praise. & in The Up to date York Globe-Telegram Richard Starnes opened his column with a prophetical words: "Yossarian will, I think, live a very long time." An sooner reviewer known as a book "repetitious and monotonous", & an additional "dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights."

Catch-22 has enjoyed the steadily low since its publication. Mike Nichols's flick version of the novel from either 1970 is considered disappointing, although its practiced cast tried its better. Nichols emphasized a absurdity of war, & when Heller, he rejected U.s. militarism. Orson Welles, who as well was interested around filming a book, was in the role of General Dreedle. Fallowing writing Catch-22, Heller worked in many Hollywood screenplays, like Sex and the Single Girl, Casino Royale, and Dirty Dingus Magee, and contributed to the TV indicate "McHale's Navy" under the pseudonym Max Orange. In the 1960s Heller was involved by having a anti-Vietnam war protest movement.

Other works (1974-2000)
Heller waited Xiii years prior to publishing his next novel - a darker & sombre Something Happened (1974). It portrayed a corporation human Bob Slocum, world health organization suffers from either insomnia & well-nigh smells the disaster mounting toward him. Slocum's life is undramatic, however he feels that his happiness is threatened by unknown forces. "When an ambulance comes, I'd rather not know for whom." He doesn't part Yossarian's rebelliousness, however he acts with cynicism as a "wolf among a pack of wolves". Heller's play-in-the-play, I Bombed within Future Haven (1968), was written in a portion to express his protest against a Vietnam war. It was produced in Broadway & run 86 performances. Catch-22 has as well been dramatized. It was foremost performed at a John Drew Theater inside East Hampton, Just released York, July 13, 1971.

Heller's late works include Good As Gold (1979), where a protagonist Bruce Gold seeks to regain a Jewishness he has wasted. Readers hailed a operate as a go to to punning & verbal games familiar from either Heller's 1st novel. God Knows (1984) was the modern version of the story of King David & an allegory of what it is such as for the Jew to last within a hostile globe. David has decided that he has tend one of a better area of the Bible. "I have suicide, regicide, patricide, homicide, fratricide, infanticide, adultery, incest, hanging, and more decapitations than just Saul's."

No Laughing Matter (1986), written with Speed Vogel, was a amazingly pollyannaish account of Heller's own experience as a victim of Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the period of his recovery Heller was visited among others by Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and Mel Brooks. His next book (1988) was the satiric & experimental historical fiction Picture This. Inside 1994, he returned with Closing Time - a sequel to Catch-22, depicting a todays survives of its heroes. Yossarian is at present Forty years older & every bit preoccupied by using dying when in the earliest novel. "Thank God for the atom bomb," says Yossarian. Now And Then (1998) is Heller's autobiographical work, evocation of his boyhood personal, Brooklyn's Coney Island in the 1920s and 30's. "It has struck me since - it couldn't have done so then - that in Catch-22 and in all my subsequent novels, and also in my one play, the resolution at the end of what narrative there is evolves from the death of someone other than the main character." (from either Okay, so).

Heller got 2 babies by his number 1 marriage. His divorcement was recounted within There is no Laughing Matter. Inside 1989 Heller married Valerie Humphries, the nurse he met piece sick. Heller died of the heart attack at his house in Long Island in December 13, 1999. His survive novel, Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man, (2000) published posthumously, was about the successful novelist world health organization tries an inspiration for his book. "A lifetime of experience had trained him never to toss away a page he had written, no matter how clumsy, until he had gone over it again for improvement, or had at least stored it in a folder for safekeeping or recorded the words on his computer." (from either Portrait of an Creative person, as an Husband).

Works
Novels
Catch-22 (1961) Something Happened (1974) Good As Gold (1979) God Knows (1984) No Laughing Matter with Speed Vogel (1986) Picture This (1988) Closing Time (1994) Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man (2000)

Autobiographies
Now And Then (1998).

Plays
We Bombed in New Haven (1967) Clevinger's Trial (1973)

Quotations
"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"

"How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?"