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Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, May 1, 1923. He married in 1945, has two children, and now resides in Manhattan. He has a Bachelor of Arts from New York University where he was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Master of Arts from Columbia, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University. Aside from writing, most of his life has been spent in teaching and journalism, with teaching assignments at Yale, Pennsylvania State University, and City College of New York, and journalistic and advertising positions with Time, Look, and McCalls. He has also worked on scripts for a television series under the name Max Orange, and has worked on screenplays for motion pictures. He served as a bombardier in the Air Force during World War II and logged over 60 missions. For his personal views, the reader can refer to a number of interview with Heller in Intellectual Digest (December, 1971), Washington Post (March 15, 1962), Book World (July 21, 1969), Newsday (July 23, 1971), and New York Times (December 3, 1967). |
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His two best-known works are a play, We Bombed in New Haven, portions of which appeared on National Education Television in The Great American Dream Machine, and this novel, Catch-22. The novel has also been dramatized by Heller and was first performed at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, New York, July 13, 1971, directed by Larry Arrick (who also did We Bombed in New Haven). |
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The dramatized version, excluding the character of Orr and the Eternal City episode and relying heavily on interrogation scenes from the novel, shows Heller's pre-occupation with the abuse of legal processes, a concern which grew with the conspiracy trials of the 1960's but which was fostered even before by the anti-Communist crusades of the 1940's and 1950's. |
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In addition, Heller has written shorter pieces, including Catch-22 Revisited" (Holiday, 41 (April, 1967), 44-61) and "How I Found James Bond" (Holiday, 41 (June, 1967), 123-125), and an excellent book review (New Republic, 147 (July 30, 1962), 23-24). |
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Heller has a new novel, Something Happened (Knopf), an earlier section of which appeared in Esquire in 1966. Indeed, in its 1963 review of Catch-22, Time anticipated the novel appearing in 1964. The excerpt appeared in 1966, and it wasn't until thirteen years after the publication of Catch-22 that Something Happened appeared. The novel traces the impressions of its protagonist, Bob Slocum, in an effort to dramatize the undramatic life of modern man and to probe the personal disorientation which occurs in the face of the collapse of society. This newest creation of Heller |
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