Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923, into a Jewish family of Russian immigrants, and lost his father at the age of five. An insurance clerk, then an apprentice blacksmith in a shipyard, he enlisted in the air force at nineteen and flew sixty bombing missions from Corsica over Italy and France. After his studies, he worked in advertising for magazines. He produced seven novels, one of them posthumous, and three plays; to those who reproached him for not having equalled his first book, he replied: “Who has?”. He died in East Hampton, in New York State, in 1999.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelCatch-22Joseph Heller · 1961Literature