SOURCE: Nagel, James. “The Early Composition History of Catch-22.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, pp. 262-90. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Nagel explores Heller's writing process for Catch-22, finding the early draft manuscripts rich with implications for the final published version of the novel.

In 1978, the Wilson Quarterly conducted a survey of professors of American literature to determine the most important novels published after World War II. To be sure, the result was a most impressive list, but Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was ranked first.¹ Its position in this survey indicates the esteem and seriousness with which literary scholars have come to regard Heller's first novel since it appeared in October 1961. Only two months later, on December 7, 1961, Heller took obvious pleasure in writing to the dean of the College of Arts and...