Discover the Best Books Written by Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heller was born on May 1, 1923, on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, from Russia. 

Even as a child, he loved to write; as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later, he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier.

His unit was the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, and 12th Air Force. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning ... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home, he "felt like a hero ... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and then at New York University on the G.I. Bill, graduating from the latter institution in 1948. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Following his graduation from Columbia, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine's College, Oxford, before teaching composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years (1950–52). 

He then briefly worked for Time Inc. before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency, where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. At home, Heller wrote. He was first published in 1948 when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. The story nearly won the "Atlantic First." He married Shirley Held from 1945 to 1981, and they had two children, Erica (born in 1952) and Theodore (born in 1956).