Catch-22 While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines, "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, [Yossarian] fell madly in love with him." As Heller observed, "Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts – and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?" The novel was published in hardback in 1961 to mixed reviews, with the
Chicago Sun-Times calling it "the best American novel in years", It sold only 30,000 hardback copies in the United States in its first year of publication. Reaction was very different in the UK, where, within one week of its publication, the novel was number one on the bestseller lists. Heller said: "My book came out in 1961[;] I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year".
Other works Heller's other works are mostly modern satire which center on the lives of members of the middle class. Shortly after
Catch-22 was published, Heller thought of an idea for his next novel, which would become
Something Happened, but did not act on it for two years. In the meantime he focused on scripts, completing the final screenplay for the movie adaptation of
Helen Gurley Brown's
Sex and the Single Girl, as well as a television comedy script that eventually aired as part of ''
McHale's Navy''. In 1967, Heller wrote a play called
We Bombed in New Haven. He completed the play in only six weeks, but spent a great deal of time working with the producers as it was brought to the stage. Heller's follow-up novel,
Something Happened, was finally published in 1974. Critics were enthusiastic about the book, and both its hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the
New York Times bestseller list. Heller's final novel,
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (a play on
Portrait of the Artist, as a Young Man by James Joyce) is a
metafictional and
semi-autobiographical work who follows an aging artist who struggles to write one final great book to match the success of his earlier work. Through the novel, "Pota" experiments with various story ideas and genres, none of which seem to satisfy him. It is often interpreted as Heller's meditation on his own career, particularly the outsized shadow cast by his debut novel
Catch-22. It was published
posthumously.
Work process Heller did not begin work on a story until he had envisioned both a first and last line. The first sentence usually appeared to him "independent of any conscious preparation." The finished version of the novel would often not begin or end with the sentences he had originally envisioned, although he usually tried to include the original opening sentence somewhere in the text. == Personal life ==