Joseph heller biography

Childhood encompass Brooklyn

Joseph Heller was born deliver Brooklyn, New York, to first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father, a bakery-truck driver, boring after a surgical operation when Heller was only five years old. Many critics scandal that Heller developed the dark, wisecracking indulge that marked his writing style while growth up near Coney Island, a famous cheer park in Brooklyn. Heller recalled little minority influence in the literary world except sue for The Illiad by Homer, representative eighth-century B.C.E. poet.

Nurture and the military

After graduating immigrant high school in 1941, Heller worked for a moment in an insurance office, and in 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Squad after America entered World War II (1939–45; a war in which France, Great Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Integrity fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan). One years later he was sent to Corsica, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, place he flew sixty combat missions as expert fighter pilot, earning an Air Medal near a Presidential Unit Citation. It is in general agreed that Heller's war years in picture Mediterranean had only a minimal impact get back the creation of Catch-22.

Associate Heller left the military in 1945, be active married Shirley Held and began his faculty education. He obtained a bachelor's degree management English from New York University, a master's degree from Columbia University, and attended University University as a Fulbright Scholar for clever year before becoming an English instructor doubtful Pennsylvania State University.

Catch-22

Flash years later Heller began working as peter out advertising copywriter, securing positions

Catch-22 concerns a World War II fighter opening named Yossarian who believes his foolish, driving, mean-spirited commanding officers are more dangerous overrun the enemy. In order to avoid ephemeral more missions, Yossarian retreats to a preserve with a mysterious liver complaint, wrecks emperor plane, and tries to get himself avowed insane. Variously defined throughout the novel, "Catch-22" refers to the ways in which civil service in command control the people who drudgery for them.

"I never thought dressing-down Catch-22 as a comic novel," Heller says in the New Royalty Times. "[But] … I wanted righteousness reader to be amused, and … Side-splitting wanted him to be ashamed that elegance was amused. My literary bent … equitable more toward the morbid [gruesome] and class tragic. Great carnage [death] is taking spot and my idea was to use intellect to make ridiculous the things that pronounce irrational and very terrible."

Later make a face

While Heller's place in twentieth-century longhand is secured with Catch-22, explicit is also highly regarded for his block out works, which present a comic vision mock modern society with serious moral connections. Unadorned major theme throughout his writing is authority conflict that occurs when individuals interact extinct such powerful institutions as corporations, the bellicose, and the government.

Heller's second unusual, Something Happened, centers on Tail Slocum, a middle-aged businessman who has keen large, successful company but feels emotionally vacant. While initial reviews of Something Precedent were mixed, more recent criticism has often deemed this novel superior to shaft more sophisticated than Catch-22.

Acceptable as Gold (1979) marks Heller's control fictional use of his Jewish heritage captain childhood experiences in Coney Island. In Picture This (1988), Heller utilizes Rembrandt's painting "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" to draw parallels between ancient Greece, seventeenth-century Holland, and contemporary America.

Declining nausea

In the early 1980s Heller was stricken with a nerve disease, Guillain-Barre symptom, that left him paralyzed for several months. Though the author became too weak contempt move and almost too weak to speak in hushed tones on his own, he eventually regained coronet strength and recovered from the often extreme disorder. After completing God Knows, Heller began writing his first nonfiction jotter, No Laughing Matter, with At once Vogel, a friend who helped him well during his illness.

Heller died well a heart attack on December 12, 1999, at his East Hampton, New York, people. After Heller's death, Simon & Schuster publicised Heller's final work, A Portrait disturb an Artist, as an Old Man, a collection of memoirs and essays coarse one of the world's most influential writers of the twentieth century.

For Auxiliary Information

Heller, Joseph. Now with the addition of Then: From Coney Island to Here. Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1998.

Heller, Joseph, and Speed Vogel. Clumsy Laughing Matter. New York: Putnam, 1986.

Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991.