ABSTRACT
The son of Isaac and Lena Heller, Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 1, 1923. After graduation from high school, he joined the Air Force in 1941, achieved the rank of first lieutenant and flew sixty missions as a B-25 wing bombardier stationed in Corsica. Continuing his education after the war and following his marriage to Shirley Held in 1945, Heller attended the University of Southern California for a year and then transferred to New York University, where he received his BA in 1948. He worked on his first novel, Catch-22, from 1954 until its publication in 1961. History had caught up with him and in 1970 Catch-22 was made into a film under the direction of Mike Nichols. During his literary career, Joseph Heller has talked a number of times about being a humorist. For Heller, humor is never a remedy, a tonic, or escape; it is a means of seeing, of striking a nerve.
