Joseph Heller was an unknown novelist on November 10, 1961, the official date of the publication of his first book, Catch-22. Within two years, the novel and the author had made a place for themselves in literary history. (The critical reception of Catch-22 is discussed in detail in the “Introduction to the Novel” section.) It was a hard act to follow. Throughout his career, Heller’s work was repeatedly compared, usually unfavorably, to his first effort. Interviewers often implied that he had not written anything since Catch-22 to match that classic. On one occasion, Heller simply replied, “Who has?”
Between the publication of his first and second novels, Heller experimented with drama, his most notable play being We Bombed in New Haven, which was first produced at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1967 and ran on Broadway for eighty-six performances in the fall of 1968. As with most of Heller’s work, the play opened to mixed reviews. Legendary critic Clive Barnes said that he would “call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see” (New York Times, October 17, 1968). Heller toys with the meaning of reality in the play, in which a group of actors put on their own performance in which they are airmen bombing into oblivion such places as Constantinople (not Istanbul) and Minnesota. Levels of reality become confused when characters begin to be killed in the fictional bombing raids but then can no longer be found in the daily lives of the acting company. Clive Barnes was “unconvinced” by the fantasy but moved by the atmosphere of “callousness, brutality, cynical jokiness, dissent, and protest,” terms that could be applied to Catch-22 and other Heller works.
Heller’s second novel, Something Happened (1974), was initially panned but earned increasing critical respect over time. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut was among the first to notice this critical trend. He wrote, “There will be a molasses-like cautiousness about accepting this book as an important one. It took more than a year for Catch-22 to gather a band of enthusiasts” (The New York Times Book Review, October 6, 1974). The novel deals with the struggles of Bob Slocum, a white-collar mid-level manager in corporate America, a man who seems to have lost all hope. He is world-weary and, as the title implies, he wonders what has happened to his life.
