HELLER, JOSEPH

HELLER, JOSEPH (1923–1999), U.S. novelist and dramatist. Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, and during World War II joined the Air Force. He attended college after the war and received a Fulbright to study at Oxford. He later worked as an advertising writer and manager for leading magazines and published short stories before turning seriously to literature. His bestselling novel Catch-22 (1961, and later made into a film) was an outstanding satire on the military mind, based on World War II experiences. It was – and is – so popular that the phrase "catch-22" won a place in the English language. (Heller returned to the characters of Catch-22 with Closing Time (1994). He also wrote the play We Bombedin New Haven (1968). His memorable dark novel about business culture, Something Happened (1974), was comically offset by his satirical portrait of an American-Jewish English professor in Good as Gold (1979). God Knows (1984) is the imaginary death-bed autobiography of King David, whose voice is shrewd, world-weary, as well as flamboyant. A recovery from illness led to Heller's No Laughing Matter (with Speed Vogel, 1986). His posthumous novel, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man (2000), a mixture of large and often biting humor, traces the struggles of Eugene Pota to find his commanding theme before his reputation diminishes. Heller's own autobiography is Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M.J. Bruccoli, Joseph Heller: A Descriptive Bibliography (2002); D. Craig, Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller's Fiction (1997); S. Pinsker, Understanding Joseph Heller (1991); A. Sorkin, Conversations with Joseph Heller (1993). (Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)