‘No one's trying to
kill you,’ Clevinger cried.
‘Then why are they
shooting at me?’ Yossarian asked.
‘They're shooting at everyone,’
Clevinger answered. ‘They're trying to kill everyone.’
‘And what difference
does that make?’ "—Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
This week 50 years ago, the classic anti-war satire by Joseph Heller (pictured here) was
published by Simon & Schuster. Though it dealt with a pilot’s attempts to
escape flying more deadly bombing missions in WWII by being termed insane, the novel would be
especially embraced by the generation
that would be faced with the Vietnam War.
Along the way, the novel’s title would come to epitomize the
ultimate bureaucratic absurdity. It came about not because there was any
significance to that number, but because the book’s publishers feared that
Heller’s title would be confused with Leon Uris’ novel Mila 18.
The August issue of Vanity Fair contains a fascinating article by Tracy Daugherty, adapted
from his biography of Heller, on the process that brought Catch-22 into being—from how
the opening sentence first came to the novelist through how the book was shepherded through
to completion by Simon & Schuster.
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