Featured Reading Guide
Joseph Heller
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.
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Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fullbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look and McCall’s magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven. Joseph Heller is an honorary fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, which he visits periodically to meet students who are writing fiction. He lives in East Hampton, New York.
topAbout the Book
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.
topJoseph Heller interview/review
From Joseph Heller in Conversation with Mark Lawson (South Bank Centre) March 1998
His voice is raw and growly, like a Coney Island ice-cream vendor’s. He is an old man now with snowy white hair and his genial demeanour is that of a man who has long basked in the steady sunlight of self-approval. Hell’s bells, why not though? Who else wrote Catch-22? What other novel has been in print continuously for nigh on 40 years? Heller’s in England this week and Mark Lawson, a journalist, treats him reverentially.
Isn’t the way that he writes his novels quite unique? Lawson prompts. Heller guffaws at that. Of course it is – like much else about him. The novels never begin with plans – nothing so simple or unoriginal as that. Every one of them has begun with a sentence leaping into his head, demanding to be written down before it disappears. This is the way Heller works, then: he sits back in the sun and waits for a sentence. Then he chips away at the thing, maybe 300 words a day, for year after year if necessary – the follow-up to Catch-22 took 13 years. He has no regrets that he hasn’t written more books. Frankly, he tells us, “I don’t know what books I’d have written if I’d had more time. Ideas come one at a time…”
And, yes, generally speaking, he had a good time as a bombardier in the war – in spite of what Yossarian may have intimated. He may have won the war against Hitler, but he lost the war of independence by taking a job. Heller smiles and quotes himself: “If we’re not careful, we grow up into the kind of people we used to despise.”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Throughout the novel, scenes of unalleviated horror are interwoven with farcically comic scenes. How effective is this juxtaposition?
- In what ways is Yossarian a typical literary hero? Would you class him as the novel’s hero or its anti-hero?
- Although Catch-22 is set in the Second World War, it was published at a time when America was going through great changes. To what extent do you think the novel provides a social commentary of the time in which it was written as well as of the era in which it was set? Are its issues still pertinent in today’s society?
- How do notions of power and bureaucracy function in Catch-22?
- How do you react to the female characters? What role do they play in the narrative?
- Catch-22 has a vast roll-call of hilarious characters. In what ways does Heller use them to develop his themes?
Other Books by Joseph Heller
Catch 22
A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes…
Something Happened
Bob Slocum was a promising executive. He had an attractive wife, three chil…
Suggested Further Reading
- Candide ~ Voltaire
- Slaughterhouse Five ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ Ken Kesey
- The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts ~ Louis de Bernières
- The Trial ~ Kafka
- Something Happened ~ Joseph Heller