Heller - Catch-22: a novel

Finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction

Named to Best Novels lists by Time, Newsweek,
the Modern Library, the New York Public Library,
the American Library Association, The Observer (UK),
and The Guardian (UK)

A monumental artifact of contemporary American literature, almost as assured of longevity as the statues on Easter Island.... Catch-22 is a novel that reminds us once again of all that we have taken for granted in our world and should not, the madness we try not to bother to notice, the deceptions and falsehoods we lack the will to try to distinguish from truth.

JOHN W. ALDRIDGE, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (1986)

Catch-22 I still think is one of the most phenomenal novels in the English language because of Hellers ability to make you laugh literally on every page while writing about the darkest of all human conditions, wartime. Im still blown away by that book.

CARL HIAASEN, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (2010)

Wildly original, brilliantly comic, brutally gruesome, it is a dazzling performance that will probably outrage nearly as many readers as it delights.... Catch-22 is a funny bookvulgarly, bitterly, savagely funny.

ORVILLE PRESCOTT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (1961)

Catch-22 is a bitter, anguished joke of a novel that embraces the existential absurdity of war without ever quite succumbing to it.

LEV GROSSMAN, TIME MAGAZINES ALL TIME 100 NOVELS (2005)

You will meet in this astonishing novel, certainly one of the most original in years, madmen of every rank. Page after page, you will howl, you will roar. You may even fall off your chair as I did. Suddenly you will sit up and mumble: Whats so funny? To call it the finest comic novel of our day is faulting it. If Joseph Heller writes no other book, he will be well remembered for this apocalyptic masterpiece.

STUDS TERKEL, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES (1961)

A novel of great power and commanding skill. One of the very best to come out of the second world war.

NEWSWEEK (1961)

BY JOSEPH HELLER

Catch as Catch Can
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
Closing Time
Picture This
No Laughing Matter (with Speed Vogel)
God Knows
Good as Gold
Something Happened
Catch-22

Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

To my mother
and to my wife, Shirley,
and my children, Erica and Ted

(1961)

To Candida Donadio, literary agent,
and Robert Gottlieb, editor.
Colleagues.

(1994)

HISTORY, CONTEXT, AND CRITICISM

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for ones own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and he could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didnt, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didnt have to; but if he didnt want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

Thats some catch, that Catch-22, he observed.

Its the best there is, Doc Daneeka agreed.

The phrase Catch-22 has so permeated American languageor embedded itself, to put it in Desert Storm terminologythat we deploy it almost every day, usually to describe an encounter with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Its usage is so common that its right there in the dictionary. Not many book titles end up being (sorry; unavoidable) catchphrases. My own American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: 1.a A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions. In the Catch-22 of a close repertoire, only music that is already familiar is thought to deserve familiarity. (Joseph McLennan) .

Joseph... who? But its possible, even likely in fact, that the other Joseph would be amused at not being mentioned until the very bottom of the entry. I can hear him chuckling and asking, And how many copies of the American Heritage Dictionary have they sold so far? I dont know, but my guess is, not as many as Catch-22, which, in the fifty years since it first appeared in October 1961, has sold over ten million.

In his memoir Now and Then, published the year he died, Heller tells us that he wrote the first chapter of his masterpiece in longhand on a yellow legal pad in 1953. It was published two years later in the quarterly New American Writing #7, under the title Catch-18. Also in that number were stories by A. A. Alvarez, Dylan Thomas, Heinrich Bll, and one by someone calling himself Jean-LouisJack Kerouac, a piece from a book he was writing called On The Road. Catch-22 and On The Road ? Not a bad issue of New American Writing, that.

The full story of how Catch-22 came about is told in Tracy Daughertys fascinating new biography, Just One Catch . Briefly: the novel grew out of Hellers experiences as a bombardier in World War II, flying missions out of Corsica over Italy. It was seven years in the writing, while its author worked in the promotional departments of McCalls and Time magazines. Just before being published, the novel had to be retitled, when it was learned that Leon Uris was about to bring out a World War II novel called Mila 18 . Which is why you didnt have a Catch-18 experience today at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The novel got some good reviews, some mixed reviews, and some pretty nasty reviews. The New Yorker s was literary waterboarding:... doesnt even seem to have been written; instead it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper... what remains is a debris of sour jokes. Heller dwells on that particular review in his memoir: I am tempted to drown in my own gloating laughter even as I set this down. What restrains me is the knowledge that the lashings still smart, even after so many years, and if I ever pretend to be a jolly good sport about them, as I am doing now, I am only pretending. (That was Joe Heller. Whatever flaws he may have had as a writer and human being, he absolutely possessed what Hemingway called the writers most essential tool: a first-class bullshit detector.) Evelyn Waugh, one of Hellers literary heroes, pointedly declined to provide a blurb for the jacket. Catch never won a literary prize and never made the New York Times hardcover bestseller list.

But a number of people fell for ithard. To quote the novels first line, It was love at first sight. They took it up as a cause, not just a book, with evangelical ardor. Among these were S. J. Perelman, Art Buchwald, and TV newsman John Chancellor, who printed up YOSSARIAN LIVES bumper stickers. (The phrase eventually became an antiwar slogan, the Kilroy Was Here of the Vietnam era.) Word spread: you have to read this book. In England, it went straight to the top of the bestseller lists. A reviewer there called it, The Naked and the Dead scripted for the Marx Brothers, a kind of From Here to Insanity