Joseph Heller

Brooklyn-born writer Joseph Heller gloried in his time spent as a bombardier flying sixty missions in Italy during World War II. Postwar, he obtained his master’s degree in English from Columbia University, afterward teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then moving into advertising as a copywriter. The idea for Catch-22, his best-known novel, came to Heller on a mundane day at home, and he wrote it first as a short story. Publisher Simon & Schuster bought the one-third of the book that had been put to paper; Heller then took eight years to finish it. The long incubation time proved fruitful, as more than ten million copies were eventually sold. In all, he produced seven novels, three plays both for screen and stage, and two autobiographies.