Joseph Heller has established himself as a major satirist in the field of contemporary American fiction. A new phrase was added to the American lexicon from the title of his first novel Catch-22 (1961). The term "catch-22" has become accepted in Webster's New World Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary and denotes a bureaucratic paradox, having the effect of entrapping the subject. Heller's fiction continues to be examined for its use of absurdist techniques and more recently for its critique of Cold War America. Heller was elected to the American Academy of Letters in 1977; in 1985 he was awarded two French prizes: the Prix Médicis Etranger and the Prix Interallie.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Isaac Heller, a truck driver, and Lena Heller, on 1 May 1923. He had a basically secular upbringing, his mother being more concerned with social forms than religious...