ABSTRACT
Biography 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 B25 wing bombardier stationed in Corsica. Con tinuing his education after the war, and follow ing 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 B.A. in 1948. After receiving an M.A. from Columbia Univer sity in 1949 and spending a year at Oxford Uni versity on a Fulbright Scholarship, he became an instructor in English at Pennsylvania State Uni versity. From 1952 to 1961 he worked succes sively as an advertising writer for Time (19521956) and Look magazines (1956-1958), and as a promotion manager for McCall’s , a position that he left in 1961 to return to the academic world and become Professor of Fiction and Dra matic Writing at Yale University and the Uni versity of Pennsylvania, and then Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York. Since 1975 he has been a full-time writer.
