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Joseph Heller (1) [1923–1999]

This page covers the author of Catch-22.

For other authors named Joseph Heller, see the disambiguation page.

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American novelist and dramatist Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on May 1, 1923. Heller started off his writing career by publishing a series of short stories, but he is most famous for his satirical novel Catch-22. Set in the closing months of World War II, Catch-22 tells the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who discovers the horrors of war and its aftereffects. This novel brought the phrase "catch-22," defined in Webster's Dictionary as "a situation presenting two equally undesirable alternatives," into everyday use. Heller wrote Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, in 1994. Other novels include As Good As Gold and God Knows. He also wrote No Laughing Matter, an account of his struggles with Guillain-Barr Syndrome, a neurological disorder, in 1986. Thirty-five years after writing his first book, Heller wrote his autobiography, entitled Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. In his memoirs, Heller reminisces about what it was like growing up in Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s. On December 13, 1999, Heller died of a heart attack in his home on Long Island. His last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, was published shortly after his death. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from Catch-22… (more)
Catch-22 38,310 copies, 504 reviews
Something Happened 2,324 copies, 24 reviews
Closing Time 1,829 copies, 14 reviews
Good as Gold 1,388 copies, 23 reviews
God Knows 1,353 copies, 10 reviews
Picture This 689 copies, 6 reviews
No Laughing Matter 208 copies, 2 reviews
We Bombed in New Haven 156 copies, 5 reviews
Sex and the Single Girl [1964 film] (Screenwriter) 20 copies
Catch-22 : a dramatization 16 copies, 1 review
Work 15 copies, 2 reviews
The Best of Modern Humor (Contributor) 283 copies, 2 reviews
Catch-22 [1970 film] (Original novel) 109 copies, 2 reviews
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (Contributor) 90 copies, 3 reviews
Famous American Plays of the 1960s (Contributor) 60 copies, 1 review

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Short biography
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 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time (the sequel to Catch-22), and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in December 1999.

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