Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Coney Island. During World War II he flew sixty missions in B-25s in North Africa and Italy. After the war he studied at the University of Southern California, New York University, Columbia and Oxford and began to write short fiction. He taught composition at Penn State for two years and in 1952 returned to New York and worked as a writer in advertising for Time, Look, and McCall's. In 1953 he wrote the beginning of "Catch 18" which, in 1961, was to be published as the famous Catch-22. In addition to novels, he wrote stage plays, screenplays, short stories, articles, memoirs and reviews.
Heller also wrote: