Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, in the Coney Island district of Brooklyn, New York, the son of Isaac and Lena Heller. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Isaac, who arrived in America in 1913, was agnostic, interested in socialist politics, and a delivery truck driver for a wholesale baker. Joseph had a half-sister, Sylvia, seven years older than he, and a half-brother, Lee (originally Eli), fourteen years older and born in Russia; their mother had died.
Joseph’s father died following an operation in 1929, as Joseph began his formal education at Coney Island’s Public School No. 188. Lena never learned to speak English well, and the family struggled financially. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Joseph immediately went to work as a file clerk for an insurance agency. When the United States entered World War II in December of that year, he took a job as a blacksmith’s assistant in the Norfolk Navy Yard. World War II would become the key formative event in Heller’s life, providing him with rich experiences in the military and, eventually, a formal education.
In 1942, as the war progressed, Heller joined the Army and worked as a file clerk. In October, he switched to the Army Air Forces, as the aviation branch was known prior to the establishment of the United States Air Force in 1947. Joseph initially intended to be a gunner on a bomber; when he was told, erroneously, that the average life span of a gunner in combat was three days, he quickly enrolled in cadet school to become an officer and bombardier.
After graduating from cadet school as a first lieutenant early in 1944, Heller was assigned to the 488th Squadron of the Twelfth Air Force in Corsica. Heller later said that, as a twenty-one-year-old officer, he initially had no serious complaints about his life in a combat unit. He enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow airmen on the base and the pleasures of visits to the group’s officer apartments in Rome, following the city’s liberation in June. The bombing runs went well enough.
All that changed on Heller’s thirty-seventh mission, a raid on Avignon, on the Rhone River in southeast France, the basis of a fictionalized account that is central to Catch-22. During the bombing run, a co-pilot panicked and set the B-25 into a dive, causing Heller to be pressed against the top of the bombardier’s compartment. After the plane was again under control, the co-pilot called over the intercom, “Help him! Help him!” Heller replied, “Help who?” “Help the bombardier!” was the co-pilot’s response. “I’m the bombardier; I’m all right,” Heller answered. When he then checked the rear of the plane, however, Heller found that one of the gunners was, in fact, wounded, and Heller realized that death lay near on these flights. The young lieutenant’s war was not the same after that. He did complete sixty missions in the Mediterranean and received an Air Medal as well as a Presidential Unit Citation with his honorable discharge.
Because of the GI Bill, a federal program that helped tens of thousands of veterans to pursue higher education following the war, Heller was able to enroll at the University of Southern California in 1945. He published his first short story in the prestigious Story magazine that year and was married to Shirley Held, with whom he eventually had two children, Erica Jill and Theodore Michael. The next year, he transferred to New York University.
At NYU, under the tutelage of Professor Maurice Baudin, Heller came to believe that he could be a professional writer. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, with the distinction of being named to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. That year he also published two short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and two more in Esquire. Heller earned his Master of Arts degree in American Literature from Columbia University the next year as well as a Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year at Oxford University in England.
Following a short teaching stint at Pennsylvania State University, Heller joined the corporate world as advertising manager at Time magazine. In 1953, he began working on a novel tentatively titled Catch-18. He later changed the title to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s novel, Mila-18. Heller accepted a managerial advertising job at Look magazine in 1956 and moved to McCall’s in 1958, still spending two hours a night on his novel. He later said that he once became discouraged, leaving the manuscript for a week to seek diversions, including watching television, but he was so bored that he hurried back to the book. He wondered how in the world people lived without a novel to write.
Catch-22 was published in 1961. Although he taught creative writing courses at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, Heller became a full-time writer for most of the next decade, returning to teaching at City College of New York from 1971 to 1975.
Heller’s personal life took traumatic turns in 1981 as he separated from his wife, Shirley, from whom he was divorced in 1984. In December 1981, Heller discovered that he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare paralytic disease. His struggle with and slow recovery from the disease is recorded in No Laughing Matter (1986) written with his friend Speed Vogel. During his rehabilitation, Heller met a nurse, Valerie Humphries, whom he married in 1987.
In addition to his fiction and memoirs, Heller wrote for the theater, television, and motion pictures. He continued his writing and teaching career until his death, of a heart attack, at his home in East Hampton, New York, on December 12, 1999. (For a detailed chronology of Heller’s life, see Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel by Stephen W. Potts.)
