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A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Catch-22 | 4 | |
| Good as Gold | 1 |
A Bad Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| Something Happened | 1 | |
| Picture This | 1 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999)
added by Fernando
Comments
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Joseph Heller is my favorite novelist, but the comment rests entirely upon Catch-22. That book was Heller's greatest work by far, and I think he hated that fact. In Now and Then, his memoir, he barely even mentions Catch-22, the book that made him famous and financially secure for the rest of his life.
eric January 29th, 2006 12:43 PM PST
I've read God Knows and Portrait of the Artist as well, and they're both strong books. Portrait is a quick read, and is exceptionally funny.
joecowley May 28th, 2007 08:58 PM PST
Catch-22 is a masterpiece. On the strength of that, I went on to read Something Happened and Good as Gold. The last two are good books, but not enough to make me want to read more of Heller. Joseph Cowley
Biography
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Joseph Heller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Joseph Heller Born: May 1, 1923 [1]
Brooklyn, New York [1]
Died: December 12, 1999 [1]
Long Island, New York [1]
Occupation: Novelist
Genres: Fiction
Influenced: Robert Altman, Kurt Vonnegut
Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American satirical novelist and playwright. He wrote the influential Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II. It was this work whose title (which was originally Catch-18) became the term commonly used to express absurdity in choice.
Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War satirists. Although he is remembered mostly by his landmark Catch-22, his works, centered on the lives of various members of the middle classes, remain exemplars of modern satire.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Catch-22 Controversy
2 Works
2.1 Short stories
2.2 Autobiographies
2.3 Novels
2.4 Plays
3 Quotations
4 Trivia
5 External links
[edit] Biography
Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Force at age 19. He was stationed in Corsica, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. It was these experiences that later became the inspiration for his first novel, Catch-22. After the war, he studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU. In 1949, Heller received his M.A. from Columbia University. From 1949-1950, he was a Fulbright scholar at St. Catherine's College in Oxford University. He returned to St. Catherine's as a visiting Fellow, for a term, in 1991 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college.[1] Heller died in 1999.
[edit] Catch-22 Controversy
In April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to The Sunday Times for clarification as to "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" in Catch-22 and a novel published in England in 1951. The book that spawned the request was written by Louis Falstein and titled The Sky is a Lonely Place in Britain and Face of a Hero in the United States. Falstein's novel was available two years before Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 (1953) while he was a student at Oxford. The Times stated: "Both have central characters who are using their wits to escape the aerial carnage; both are haunted by an omnipresent injured airman, invisible inside a white body cast". Stating he had never read Falstein's novel, or heard of him,[2] Heller said: "My book came out in 1961[;] I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year"(The Washington Post, April 27, 1998).
Something Happened (1974), 1995 Vintage paperback edition ISBN 9-780-09988980-9
[edit] Works
[edit] Short stories
Catch As Catch Can: The Collected Stories and Other Writings (2003)
Three Short Stories Of Utter Annoyance
[edit] Autobiographies
No Laughing Matter (1988)
Now And Then (1998).
[edit] Novels
Catch 22 (1961)
Something Happened (1974)
Good as Gold (1979)
God Knows (1984)
Picture This (1988)
Closing Time (1994)
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000)
[edit] Plays
We Bombed in New Haven (1967)
Catch 22 (1971)
Fernando January 29th, 2006 11:26 AM PST