Joseph heller biography

Puberty in Brooklyn

Joseph Author was born in Brooklyn, Another York, to first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father, a bakery-truck driver, died after a postoperative operation when Heller was one and only five years old. Many critics believe that Heller developed rectitude dark, wisecracking humor that noticeable his writing style while juvenile up near Coney Island, tidy famous amusement park in Borough.

Heller recalled little childhood power in the literary world bar for The Illiad by Homer, an eighth-century B.C.E. poet.

Schooling and the military

Associate graduating from high school snare 1941, Heller worked briefly relish an insurance office, and remove 1942 he enlisted in nobleness Army Air Corps after U.s.a.

entered World War II (1939–45; a war in which Writer, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan). Two years later he was sent to Corsica, an ait in the Mediterranean Sea, to what place he flew sixty combat missions as a fighter pilot, payment an Air Medal and deft Presidential Unit Citation.

It go over the main points generally agreed that Heller's conflict years in the Mediterranean confidential only a minimal impact get the gist the creation of Catch-22.

After Heller left character military in 1945, he ringed Shirley Held and began surmount college education. He obtained a-one bachelor's degree in English steer clear of New York University, a master's degree from Columbia University, cranium attended Oxford University as spruce up Fulbright Scholar for a twelvemonth before becoming an English guru at Pennsylvania State University.

Catch-22

Two years afterwards Heller began working as conclusion advertising copywriter, securing positions

During this time Hellion was also writing short tradition and scripts for film tolerate television, as well as operation on Catch-22. After influence success of Catch-22, Heller quit his job at McCall's and concentrated exclusively private eye writing fiction and plays.

Catch-22 concerns a Earth War II fighter pilot given name Yossarian who believes his impolitic, ambitious, mean-spirited commanding officers hook more dangerous than the conflicting.

In order to avoid quick more missions, Yossarian retreats be a hospital with a sphinxlike liver complaint, wrecks his area, and tries to get yourself declared insane. Variously defined all the way through the novel, "Catch-22" refers count up the ways in which bureaucracy in command control the party who work for them.

"I never thought of Catch-22 as a hilarious novel," Heller says in righteousness New York Times. "[But] … I wanted character reader to be amused, beginning … I wanted him assent to be ashamed that he was amused. My literary bent … is more toward the gloomy [gruesome] and the tragic.

Waiting in the wings carnage [death] is taking in and my idea was arrangement use humor to make farcical the things that are blind and very terrible."

Following works

While Heller's brace in twentieth-century letters is bound 1 with Catch-22, stylishness is also highly regarded patron his other works, which cause a comic vision of recent society with serious moral dealings.

A major theme throughout coronate writing is the conflict focus occurs when individuals interact involve such powerful institutions as corporations, the military, and the governance.

Heller's second novel, Something Happened, centers plus Bob Slocum, a middle-aged employer who has a large, flourishing company but feels emotionally bare.

While initial reviews of Something Happened were crossbred, more recent criticism has oft deemed this novel superior fight back and more sophisticated than Catch-22.

Good as Fortune (1979) marks Heller's foremost fictional use of his Human heritage and childhood experiences invite Coney Island. In Painting This (1988), Heller utilizes Rembrandt's painting "Aristotle Contemplating primacy Bust of Homer" to flatter parallels between ancient Greece, seventeenth-century Holland, and contemporary America.

Declining health

In high-mindedness early 1980s Heller was ill with a nerve disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, that left him unfit for several months. Though nobleness author became too weak tinge move and almost too debilitated to breathe on his announce, he eventually regained his suspicious and recovered from the frequently fatal disorder.

After completing God Knows, Heller began writing his first nonfiction complete, No Laughing Matter, with Speed Vogel, a analyst who helped him considerably nigh his illness.

Heller boring of a heart attack bent December 12, 1999, at surmount East Hampton, New York, nation state. After Heller's death, Simon & Schuster published Heller's final see to, A Portrait of play down Artist, as an Old Subject, a collection of memories and essays by one splash the world's most influential writers of the twentieth century.

For More Information

Hellion, Joseph. Now and Then: From Coney Island to Respecting. Franklin Center, PA: Printer Library, 1998.

Heller, Carpenter, and Speed Vogel. Thumb Laughing Matter. New York: Putnam, 1986.

Ruderman, Book.

Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991.