Quote of the Day (“Catch-22,” on War’s Madness)

" ‘They're trying to kill me,’ Yossarian told him calmly.

 ‘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.