More on Joseph Heller
From the Archives of The New York Times

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In this Feature

News and Interviews

Reviews

Hear It: Joseph Heller reads from and talks about "Catch-22"

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JOSPEH HELLER (Credit: Jerry Bauer)

NEWS AND INTERVIEWS:

Joseph Heller Draws Dead Bead on the Politics of Gloom (September 10, 1968)
Heller was a staunch opponent of the war in Vietnam. He supported the candidacy of anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy despite his skepticism of politicians.

Theater: Heller's 'We Bombed in New Haven' Opens (October 17, 1968)
Clive Barnes had mixed feelings about Heller's play: "If I was forced to a judgment I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see."

Yossarian Is Alive And Well in the Mexican Desert (March 16, 1969)
Eight years after its publication, "Catch-22" had become a modern classic. Mike Nichols, one of the most celebrated directors of the day, had taken on the project of bringing it to the big screen, with the help of Buck Henry's screenplay and a stellar cast. Nora Ephron went on location in Mexico and found a jovial mood on the set.

A Triumphant 'Catch' (June 28, 1970)
Vincent Canby calls "Catch-22" the best movie of 1970, but there's a catch. Without having read the book, it's hard to make sense of some of the condensations that were required to translate the book to film.

They're Leaving the Reservation (August 29, 1972)
In this Letter to the Editor, Joseph Heller responds to Hubert Humphrey's call for Democrats to "come home." Heller says he is alarmed by the violence and alienation of young Democrats. Comparing their tactics to Mao's cultural revolutionaries, Heller laments that in 1972, he must "leave the reservation."

2d Heller Book Due 13 Years After First (February 18, 1974)
Referring to the meticulous writing process that long delayed the follow-up to "Catch-22", Heller's publisher, Robert Gottlieb, says he knew all along that "He'd turn it in--like all real writers--when he was ready."

Catching Joseph Heller (March 4, 1979)
Barbara Gelb profiles Heller shortly before publication of "Good as Gold." Heller has never been afraid to laugh at death, but Geld finds him sensitive about his fame and writing gifts.

'Catch-22': Cadets Hail a Chronicler of the Absurd (October 6, 1986)
At a celebration for the 25th anniversary of the publication of "Catch-22," Heller was warmly greeted at the Air Force Academy. Teachers at the academy reveal that the anti-war classic, a searing indictment of military bureaucracy, has become required reading for cadets.

The Loony Horror of it All, 'Catch-22' Turns 25. (October 26, 1986)
John W. Aldridge examines the changing critical attitudes towards "Catch-22" over the years. At first, many reviewers were perplexed by the book's surrealism and grotesquery. As writers like Heller and Phillip Roth began to grow in prominence, and realistic literature became less dominant in the postwar years, critics grew to consider "Catch-22" a "monumental artifact of contemporary American literature."

Catch-22 Plus: A Conversation With Joseph Heller (August 28, 1994)
Barbara Gelb talks to Joseph Heller about "Closing Time."

REVIEWS:

"Catch-22" reviewed by Orville Prescott (1961)
"'Catch-22,' by Joseph Heller, is not an entirely successful novel. It is not even a good novel. It is not even a good novel by conventional standards. But there can be no doubt that it is the strangest novel yet written about the United States Air Force in World War II. Wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome, it is a dazzling performance that will probably outrage nearly as many readers as it delights. In any case, it is one of the most startling first novels of the year and it may make its author famous."

"Catch-22" reviewed by Richard G. Stern (1961)
"'Catch-22' has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel. One can say that it is much too long because its material--the cavortings and miseries of an American bomber squadron stationed in late World War II Italy--is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of its many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design."

"Something Happened" Reviewed by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1974)
"'Catch-22' is now the dominant myth about Americans in the war against fascism. 'Something Happened,' if swallowed, could become the dominant myth about the middle- class veterans who came home from that war to become heads of nuclear families. The proposed myth has it that those families were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying, in order to make as much money as they could for their little families, and they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness. The proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process."

"Good as Gold" (1979)
"'Good as Gold' is a nightmare of abuse and opportunism, of surreal graffiti. It is a fantasy and nursery rhyme laced with acid. It is peopled by sloppy phantoms, bad jokes and bad faith, static in the psyche, betrayal in caricature. Mr. Heller is neither amused nor does he seek to be amusing. He indicts a class of clerks."

"God Knows" (1984)
"We have reason to clap hands. Clearly Mr. Heller is dancing at the top of his form again. 'God Knows' is original, sad, wildly funny and filled with roaring. Ostensibly the story of King David, told in the first person, it is as much commentary as novel, written by a latter-day Rashi (the 11th-century French Jewish exegete), inspired by Brooklyn, the Marx Brothers and maybe Monty Python rather than medieval France."

"No Laughing Matter" (1986)
"Mr. Heller describes in harrowing and obsessed detail the rapidity and extent of his decline, which in no more than two weeks' time reduced him to a state where he could barely breathe on his own, let alone move his arms, lift his head or even swallow, and which involved many months of rehabilitation, during which he had to relearn tiny muscle movements that most of us take for granted as a condition of being alive... And yet we do laugh, reading this account of his ordeal. We laugh because as well as being an astute observer of his suffering - especially describing the anxiety (he calls it terror) of a hosptial's intensive care unit - Mr. Heller can be blackly funny about it."

"Picture This" (1988)
"This odd piece of fiction is an extended sardonic joke on or about Rembrandt's painting 'Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,' the one that was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1961 for the then-record sum of $2,300,000. The book is a departure for Joseph Heller, not really being a novel or pretending to novelistic form, but consisting rather of a set of reflections on the loosely related themes of war and its stupidity, justice and the lack of it, money, and government."

"Closing Time" (1994)
"Now, 33 years after his literary debut, Mr. Heller has given us not just a successor, but the sequel to 'Catch-22.' The move might seem foolhardy, since the fingers on one hand are more than enough to count sequels that measure up to -- to say nothing of improving on -- their originals. Yet, surprisingly enough, he has more than got away with it. Although 'Closing Time' won't astonish readers with its inventive brilliance and surprise (after all, they've read 'Catch-22'), it contains a richness of narrative tone and of human feeling lacking in the earlier book."

HEAR IT: Get RealAudio

Joseph Heller Talks about The Making of the Film "Catch-22"
From a lecture at the 92nd Street Y, December 7, 1970

Joseph Heller Reads from "Catch-22"
From a reading at the 92nd Street Y, January 30, 1975

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