Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 1, 1923, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants only recently arrived in the United States. His mother then barely spoke English; his father drove a delivery truck for a bakery until, when Heller was only five years old, he died unexpectedly during a routine ulcer operation. The denial of this death in particular and the bare fact of mortality in general were to color Heller’s later life and work. The youngest of three children, Heller spent his boyhood in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, an enclave of lower-and middle-class Jewish families, in the shadow of the famed amusement park. Both his family and his teachers recognized Heller as a bright but bored student; he tinkered with writing short stories while still in high school.

In 1942, at the age of nineteen, Heller joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. He spent one of the war years flying sixty missions as a wing bombardier in a squadron of B-25’s stationed on Corsica in the Mediterranean. This proved to be the crucial year of his life; it provided him with the materials, and the bitterly sardonic attitude, out of which he forged his major work—Catch-22—as well as his three plays. Moreover, his sixty missions, many of them brutal and bloody (including the series of raids on Bologna that form the core of Catch-22), profoundly affected the attitude toward death that informs all of his work.

Demobilized in 1945, having achieved the rank of first lieutenant, Heller married fellow Brooklynite Shirley Held, with whom he had two children. Heller spent the next seven years within academe. Under the G.I. Bill, he attended college, first at the University of Southern California and then at New York University, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1948. Heller then traveled uptown to earn a master’s degree at Columbia University before receiving one of the first Fulbright scholarships to study at Oxford. He returned to the United States to teach English at Pennsylvania State University between 1950 and 1952.

During the remainder of the 1950’s, Heller was employed in the advertising departments of Time, Look, and McCall’s magazines successively. In 1954, he began writing, at night and during odd hours, the manuscript that would be published eight years later as Catch-22. Almost forty years old when Catch-22 finally appeared, Heller ironically referred to himself as an “aging prodigy.”

Heller abandoned his successful advertising career during the 1960’s and returned to teaching. His position as distinguished professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY) afforded him both the salary to support his family and the free time to devote to his writing. In these years, he began work on a second novel, wrote several motion-picture and television scripts (usually adaptations of the work of others and often using a pseudonym), and completed his first play, We Bombed in New Haven.

Something Happened, Heller’s second novel, took thirteen years to complete before appearing in 1974. Never fully at ease with academic life, Heller resigned his chair at CUNY in 1975, and in 1979 he published his third novel, Good as Gold. Although he occasionally lectured on the college circuit and served as writer-in-residence at both Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, Heller was basically a reclusive writer, uncomfortable at literary gatherings and suspicious of the trappings of literary success. His life and work seemed guided by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

In December, 1981, Heller was...