Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 1st, 1923. He was in the Army Air Corps in World War II and later became a renowned author.



Biographical Information
Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 1st, 1923. He was born from Russian-Jewish first generation immigrants who had just recently come to America. A year after he graduated from highschool, Heller entered the Army Air Corps in World War 2. Although he was a fighter pilot in the air force critics and historians have generally agreed that this had little impact on his creation of one of his most popular books, Catch 22. After he left the military he married Shirley Held and attended college and New York University, Columbia University, and Oxford University as a Fulbright Scholar. He began to write for magazines as he worked on Catch 22. With Catch 22 being a success he quit his magazine writing job and stuck to fiction and playwrights. Heller was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nerve disease that left him paralyzed in the early 1980s. He later died of a heart attack on December 12, 1999 in his East Hampton, New York home.

Selected Works

 * Catch 22
 * Catch 22 was Heller's first novel and easily his most successful. It's a satirical war novel about World War II.


 * Something Happened


 * God Knows

Auto Biographies
 * No Laughing Matter
 * This was Heller's first auto biography.


 * Now and Then