All that changed on Heller’s thirty-seventh mission, a raid on Avignon, on the Rhone River in southeast France, the basis of a fictionalized account that is central to Catch-22. During the bombing run, a co-pilot panicked and set the B-25 into a dive, causing Heller to be pressed against the top of the bombardier’s compartment. After the plane was again under control, the co-pilot called over the intercom, “Help him! Help him!” Heller replied, “Help who?” “Help the bombardier!” was the co-pilot’s response. “I’m the bombardier; I’m all right,” Heller answered. When he then checked the rear of the plane, however, Heller found that one of the gunners was, in fact, wounded, and Heller realized that death lay near on these flights. The young lieutenant’s war was not the same after that. He did complete sixty missions in the Mediterranean and received an Air Medal as well as a Presidential Unit Citation with his honorable discharge.
Because of the GI Bill, a federal program that helped tens of thousands of veterans to pursue higher education following the war, Heller was able to enroll at the University of Southern California in 1945. He published his first short story in the prestigious Story magazine that year and was married to Shirley Held, with whom he eventually had two children, Erica Jill and Theodore Michael. The next year, he transferred to New York University.
At NYU, under the tutelage of Professor Maurice Baudin, Heller came to believe that he could be a professional writer. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, with the distinction of being named to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. That year he also published two short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and two more in Esquire. Heller earned his Master of Arts degree in American Literature from Columbia University the next year as well as a Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year at Oxford University in England.
Following a short teaching stint at Pennsylvania State University, Heller joined the corporate world as advertising manager at Time magazine. In 1953, he began working on a novel tentatively titled Catch-18. He later changed the title to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s novel, Mila-18. Heller accepted a managerial advertising job at Look magazine in 1956 and moved to McCall’s in 1958, still spending two hours a night on his novel. He later said that he once became discouraged, leaving the manuscript for a week to seek diversions, including watching television, but he was so bored that he hurried back to the book. He wondered how in the world people lived without a novel to write.
Catch-22 was published in 1961. Although he taught creative writing courses at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, Heller became a full-time writer for most of the next decade, returning to teaching at City College of New York from 1971 to 1975.
Heller’s personal life took traumatic turns in 1981 as he separated from his wife, Shirley, from whom he was divorced in 1984. In December 1981, Heller discovered that he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare paralytic disease. His struggle with and slow recovery from the disease is recorded in No Laughing Matter (1986) written with his friend Speed Vogel. During his rehabilitation, Heller met a nurse, Valerie Humphries, whom he married in 1987.
In addition to his fiction and memoirs, Heller wrote for the theater, television, and motion pictures. He continued his writing and teaching career until his death, of a heart attack, at his home in East Hampton, New York, on December 12, 1999. (For a detailed chronology of Heller’s life, see Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel by Stephen W. Potts.)
