Heller, Joseph (1923-1999)

The six months Joseph Heller flew B-52 bombing missions over Italy in 1944 provided him with the traumatic inspiration for a new satirical, an art that captured, in all its complexities and contradictions, the liberal world order centered on U.S. power that rose from the ruins of World War II (1939-1945). Discharged from the army, Heller returned to his Brooklyn, New York, birthplace near Coney Island (where he was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on May 1, 1923) to marry Shirley Held and apply under the GI Bill to the University of Southern California and later New York University. In 1949 he received his master of arts degree from Columbia University, where he had attended Lionel Trilling's lectures on American literature, and he pursued further literary study as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford University. He was already a widely published short-story writer and father of two children when he took a teaching post at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952, before leaving academia to work in advertising and on the draft of his first novel. Nine years in the writing, Catch-22 (1961) became a publishing phenomenon that shaped Heller's career, establishing his key themes of death, denial, and the irrationality of organized life under Cold War capitalism. Initially hailed as absurdist or black humorist, Heller's blend of satire, caricature, and nonlinear narrative was later identified as an exemplary instance of postmodern fiction.