50 Fun Facts About Joseph Heller

Under Catch-22, an airman can be excused from combat for insanity only by doing what?

Asks to be grounded: yet wanting out of deadly missions shows a rational mind, so whoever asks is sane and has to keep flying. The phrase soon entered dictionaries as the name for any no-win trap.

In which Brooklyn neighbourhood was Heller born in 1923?

Coney Island never left his work: two of his later novels return to its streets, and his 1998 memoir is subtitled 'From Coney Island to Here'.

Heller flew 60 bombing missions over Italy and France from which Mediterranean island?

Corsica. He said it was all games, 'being in a Hollywood movie', until his 37th mission, when flak hit his plane; after that he was 'scared even on the milk runs'.

A flak hit that wounded Heller's gunner over Avignon inspired the death of which Catch-22 character?

Snowden. Heller fused his own gunner's thigh wound with the story of an airman on another crew who died moaning that he was cold, the scene that haunts Yossarian through the whole book.

From which university did Heller receive his M.A. in English in 1949?

Columbia. The G.I. Bill was paying his way: discharged in 1945, he had finished at New York University only a year before the master's.

Heller spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at which university?

Oxford, in 1949–50. He came home to two years of teaching freshman composition at Penn State, then quit the classroom for advertising.

Which future suspense novelist once wrote advertising copy alongside Heller?

Mary Higgins Clark left the office in 1949 to fly as a Pan Am stewardess, and a flight into Czechoslovakia gave her the plot of her first published story.

For which news magazine did Heller write advertising copy in the 1950s while working on Catch-22?

Time, then Look and McCall's. Even after the novel came out in 1961 it earned too little to live on at first, and he went on working to support his writing.

In Catch-22's opening line, Yossarian falls madly in love at first sight with whom?

The chaplain. The sentence came to Heller as he lay in bed one morning in 1953, and he wrote the whole opening chapter out in longhand at his advertising job that day.

Catch-22's first chapter appeared in a 1955 anthology beside a pseudonymous excerpt from which writer's unpublished novel?

Jack Kerouac, signing himself 'Jean-Louis', had a slice of On the Road in the same issue of New World Writing. Heller's chapter was the only part of his novel yet written.

Catch-22 got its final number to avoid confusion with which Leon Uris novel?

Mila 18, Uris's novel of the Warsaw ghetto, came out the same year from a best-selling author. Two books sharing a number would clash, so the unknown Heller's Catch-18 had to change.

Which Simon & Schuster editor is credited with choosing the number in Catch-22's title?

Robert Gottlieb said it came to him in bed one night and he rang Heller in the morning. Heller's agent later claimed the number marked her October 22 birthday, which Gottlieb called 'absolutely untrue'.

Which Catch-22 officer keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly before they can go home?

Colonel Cathcart wants to impress his superiors and make general, so the target moves whenever Yossarian reaches it. By the end of the novel it stands at 80.

Told he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, what did Heller famously reply?

'Who has?' He had grounds for the swagger: by his death the novel had sold more than 10 million copies in America and given the language a new phrase.

Slow to sell at home, Catch-22 shot to number one within a week of publication in which country?

Britain, where Jonathan Cape's edition topped the list in a week. In America it sold about 30,000 hardbacks in its first year and never reached a bestseller list in that form.

What rank and role does Yossarian hold in Catch-22?

Captain and bombardier. He is made captain after a raid on Ferrara in which, having missed a bridge, he goes round again and destroys it at the cost of a crewman's life.

Catch-22's squadron is based on which Mediterranean island?

On Pianosa, Yossarian shares his tent with the kit of Mudd, a man killed in action two hours after arriving, before he was ever officially checked in.

In Catch-22, Lieutenant Scheisskopf is obsessed with winning what?

Parades. He is too busy drilling cadets to notice his neglected wife, and the army rewards the mania: he rises from lieutenant to general.

Which heritage does Yossarian claim for himself in Catch-22?

Assyrian. He tells Clevinger that people hate him for it and are plotting to kill him; the 1994 sequel drops the joke and makes him Armenian.

Which Catch-22 character first explains the catch to Yossarian?

Doc Daneeka, the flight surgeon. Falsely listed aboard a plane that crashes, he is ruled dead and can convince nobody, not even his wife, that he is still alive.

Which Catch-22 mess officer builds a black-market syndicate in which 'everybody has a share'?

Milo Minderbinder starts out buying fresh eggs for the mess hall and ends up hiring German planes to bomb his own squadron, a deal he excuses by showing the profit it made.

At the end of Catch-22, Orr is revealed to have rowed to which neutral country?

Sweden. Orr's crash-landings on mission after mission turn out to have been rehearsals, and the news that he made it sends Yossarian running after him.

Which Catch-22 airman has screaming nightmares every night, except when a mission is due?

Hungry Joe keeps finishing his tour, but the total is raised before his orders home arrive, and only going back on combat duty stops the screaming.

Heller said Catch-22 had been influenced by Céline, Nabokov and which English novelist?

Evelyn Waugh was sent an advance copy and was not flattered: he wrote back that it was no novel but 'a collection of sketches', with passages 'quite unsuitable to a lady's reading'.

In what state does Yossarian line up to receive his medal in Catch-22?

Stark naked. After a young gunner dies in his plane he refuses to put a uniform back on, and he watches the funeral from a tree in the same state.

Which slogan about Catch-22's hero appeared on stickers in the 1960s?

'Yossarian Lives': newsman John Chancellor had stickers printed privately, pasted them in NBC's corridors and executive washrooms, and handed Heller a packet after interviewing him on the Today show.

Which director tried to buy Heller's novel for the screen in 1962, then acted in the 1970 film of Catch-22?

Orson Welles had wanted to make it himself. He flew to the location for about two weeks to play General Dreedle, taking the job to help pay for a film of his own.

Who directed the 1970 film of Catch-22?

Mike Nichols cast Art Garfunkel, and the shoot kept the singer away for so long that Paul Simon wrote 'The Only Living Boy in New York' about being left behind.

Who played Yossarian in the 1970 film of Heller's Catch-22?

Alan Arkin got the role that Jack Lemmon had wanted for himself while an earlier studio held the rights.

The 1970 film of Catch-22 built its wartime Italian air base in which country?

Mexico. Unable to find unspoilt coast in Italy, the producers built a runway near Guaymas on a site that could be reached only by boat until they laid a five-mile road.

Which wartime bomber did the makers of the 1970 Catch-22 film buy up and restore by the squadron?

B-25 Mitchell. Stunt pilot Frank Tallman rounded up 18 of them, each bought and made airworthy for about $10,000; one had been an heiress's wedding present to a playboy, fitted with a bed.

Which streaming service premiered the Catch-22 miniseries in May 2019?

Hulu's series was shot in Sardinia, where George Clooney was thrown from his scooter by a car on his way to the set and left hospital the same day.

Heller was one of many uncredited writers on which chaotic 1967 spy spoof?

Casino Royale. Heller rewrote the script for producer Charles Feldman, got no credit, and wrote the experience up as 'How I found James Bond, lost my self-respect and almost made $150,000 in my spare time'.

Which actor took over the colonel's role that George Clooney gave up in the 2019 Catch-22 miniseries?

Kyle Chandler stepped in when Clooney moved to the smaller part of Scheisskopf, a switch that left the star more room to direct.

In Heller's 1979 satire Good as Gold, the hero hopes to become the first Jewish holder of which office?

Secretary of State. He simply refuses to believe that Henry Kissinger, who had already held the post, is really Jewish.

Who narrates Heller's novel Something Happened?

Bob Slocum is an executive who dreads his office and his family. Publicity promised more laughs from the author of Catch-22, but one early review called it 'one of the unhappiest books ever written'.

Heller's 1967 anti-war play was titled We Bombed in which city?

New Haven is where it opened, at Yale, a year before Broadway. Its actors play actors playing airmen who begin to fear that the deaths in their script are real.

Who stabs Yossarian near the end of Catch-22?

Nately's whore. Yossarian only brings her the news that Nately is dead, but she turns on the messenger, and she is still lunging at him as he runs off at the very end.

Heller's 1984 novel God Knows is narrated by which biblical figure?

King David narrates from his deathbed, boasting that his is the best story in the Bible and complaining that Michelangelo's statue shows him uncircumcised.

Heller's 1988 novel Picture This is built around a painting by which artist?

Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. Heller makes the philosopher a character in the book, who watches as Rembrandt paints his portrait.

Heller's 1994 sequel to Catch-22 is titled what?

Closing Time makes Yossarian 68 in the 1990s although he was 28 in 1944. Asked about the sums, Heller said: 'I know, but I decided to ignore it.'

In Catch-22, Yossarian tells Colonel Korn the Germans have a new gun that fires what?

Glue. He tells the colonel, as a drunken joke at the officers' club, that the 'Lepage glue gun' sticks a whole formation of planes together in mid-air, with a dangerous raid on Bologna looming.

Which syndrome left Heller temporarily paralysed after a December 1981 diagnosis?

Guillain–Barré. He first noticed he could not swallow, then could not pull a sweater over his head; months in hospital followed, and he later married one of his nurses.

Which comedy director was among the friends at the paralysed Heller's bedside in No Laughing Matter?

Mel Brooks, a devoted hypochondriac, leaned over the hospital bed and quizzed Heller on exactly how the numbness had started and spread.

Heller's posthumous final novel plays on the title of a work by which author?

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man becomes Heller's Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, in which an ageing novelist abandons draft after draft trying to match his famous first book.

Which fellow novelist called Heller's death in 1999 'a calamity for American literature'?

Kurt Vonnegut, an old friend. He later wrote a poem about a billionaire's party where Heller told him he had one thing their host never could: 'the knowledge that I've got enough'.

Which military academy threw a 25th-birthday celebration for Catch-22 in 1986, with Heller as guest of honour?

U.S. Air Force Academy. Nearly 900 cadets stood to applaud him and there was a birthday cake for Yossarian; their teachers assign the satire so that future officers learn to question bureaucracy.

Which TV comedy eventually aired a script Heller wrote in the early 1960s?

McHale's Navy aired his script 'PT 73, Where Are You?' in November 1962: a sitcom half-hour about a crew that mislays its own torpedo boat, from the author of a savage war satire.

Heller would not start a story until he had envisioned which two things?

First and last lines. He kept one closing line, 'I am a cow', on a notecard for six years before deciding it was no good and dropping it from Something Happened.

In Catch-22, Yossarian has 'decided to live forever or' do what?

Die in the attempt. Heller adds that Yossarian's 'only mission' whenever he went up 'was to come down alive', which is the whole plot in a sentence.