Catch 22

A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. The 'catch' is that soldiers have to claim to be mad in order to get out of fighting - but being capable of making such a claim automatically proves them sane. With a cast of magnificently larger-than-life characters who are rushed along at a breathless pace, for once this really is a novel it's hard to put down. CATCH-22 was made into a film.

Short-listed for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003

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.

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