I thought this was a rotten film, but then I read the book first which is ten times better than the film and then some. Full of black humour, pure horror and lashings of irony, it is tedious and repetitive in places but in my mind it is a masterpiece. Everybody should read it.
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.
This hilarious and tragic satire was adapted into a film in 1970. Directed by Mike Nichols, the film starred Alan Arkin and featured Art Garfunkel, Jon Voight, Martin Sheen and Orson Welles.
‘Blessedly, monstrously, bloatedly, cynically funny and fantastically unique. No one has ever written a book like this’ - Financial Times
Author
About Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fullbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look and McCall's magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven. Joseph Heller died in 1999.
