Joseph Heller
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50 free Joseph Heller trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Joseph Heller flew 60 missions as a B-25 bombardier, came home feeling like a hero, and then spent eight years turning the experience into the most famous anti-war satire in English. Catch-22 sold only 30,000 hardbacks in its first American year, topped the British charts within a week, and eventually put a phrase into the dictionary. Everything he wrote afterwards lived in its shadow. These 50 questions cover the whole career. The Coney Island childhood and the blacksmith's apprenticeship, the Fulbright year at Oxford, the advertising job beside Mary Higgins Clark, the morning in 1953 when the first line arrived, the magazine that printed Catch-18, the Leon Uris novel that forced the title change and the editor who picked 22. Then Something Happened and Bob Slocum, the Vietnam-era play We Bombed in New Haven, God Knows narrated by King David, Picture This and its Rembrandt, Closing Time and the ageing Yossarian, the Guillain-Barré diagnosis and No Laughing Matter, and the posthumous Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under Catch-22, an airman can be excused from combat for insanity only by doing what?
Asks to be grounded
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.
Q 02In which Brooklyn neighbourhood was Heller born in 1923?
Coney Island
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'.
Q 03Heller flew 60 bombing missions over Italy and France from which Mediterranean island?
Corsica
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'.
Q 04A flak hit that wounded Heller's gunner over Avignon inspired the death of which Catch-22 character?
Snowden
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.
Q 05From which university did Heller receive his M.A. in English in 1949?
Columbia
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.
Q 06Heller spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at which university?
Oxford
Oxford, in 1949–50. He came home to two years of teaching freshman composition at Penn State, then quit the classroom for advertising.
Q 07Which future suspense novelist once wrote advertising copy alongside Heller?
Mary Higgins Clark
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.
Q 08For which news magazine did Heller write advertising copy in the 1950s while working on Catch-22?
Time
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.
Q 09In Catch-22's opening line, Yossarian falls madly in love at first sight with whom?
The chaplain
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.
Q 10Catch-22's first chapter appeared in a 1955 anthology beside a pseudonymous excerpt from which writer's unpublished novel?
Jack Kerouac
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.
Q 11Catch-22 got its final number to avoid confusion with which Leon Uris novel?
Mila 18
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.
Q 12Which Simon & Schuster editor is credited with choosing the number in Catch-22's title?
Robert Gottlieb
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'.
Q 13Which Catch-22 officer keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly before they can go home?
Colonel Cathcart
Q 21Which Catch-22 mess officer builds a black-market syndicate in which 'everybody has a share'?
Milo Minderbinder
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.
Q 22At the end of Catch-22, Orr is revealed to have rowed to which neutral country?
Sweden
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.
Q 23Which Catch-22 airman has screaming nightmares every night, except when a mission is due?
Hungry Joe
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.
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.
Q 14Told he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, what did Heller famously reply?
Who has?
'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.
Q 15Slow to sell at home, Catch-22 shot to number one within a week of publication in which country?
Britain
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.
Q 16What rank and role does Yossarian hold in Catch-22?
Captain and bombardier
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.
Q 17Catch-22's squadron is based on which Mediterranean island?
Pianosa
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.
Q 18In Catch-22, Lieutenant Scheisskopf is obsessed with winning what?
Parades
Parades. He is too busy drilling cadets to notice his neglected wife, and the army rewards the mania: he rises from lieutenant to general.
Q 19Which heritage does Yossarian claim for himself in Catch-22?
Assyrian
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.
Q 20Which Catch-22 character first explains the catch to Yossarian?
Doc Daneeka
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.
Q 24Heller said Catch-22 had been influenced by Céline, Nabokov and which English novelist?
Evelyn Waugh
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'.
Q 25In what state does Yossarian line up to receive his medal in Catch-22?
Stark naked
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.
Q 26Which slogan about Catch-22's hero appeared on stickers in the 1960s?
Yossarian Lives
'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.
Q 27Which director tried to buy Heller's novel for the screen in 1962, then acted in the 1970 film of Catch-22?
Orson Welles
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.
Q 28Who directed the 1970 film of Catch-22?
Mike Nichols
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.
Q 29Who played Yossarian in the 1970 film of Heller's Catch-22?
Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin got the role that Jack Lemmon had wanted for himself while an earlier studio held the rights.
Q 30The 1970 film of Catch-22 built its wartime Italian air base in which country?
Mexico
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.