Comedy is murder
Thomas Powers: Joseph Heller, 8 March 2012
Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller
by Tracy Daugherty.
Robson, 548 pp., £25, September 2011,978 1 84954 172 5 Show More
by Tracy Daugherty.
Robson, 548 pp., £25, September 2011,
Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Catch-22
by Erica Heller.
Vintage, 272 pp., £8.99, October 2011,978 0 09 957008 0 Show More
by Erica Heller.
Vintage, 272 pp., £8.99, October 2011,
“... The longest years of Joseph Heller’s writing life fell between his first book and his second. He set no records but the delay eventually got his name into magazine pieces about one-book authors, a cautionary roster of the silent that included Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison. Heller’s history reflected theirs – the dreams of youth and years of literary apprenticeship, a period of obsessed scribbling, enthusiasm from a publisher, a ripple of applause from the fraternity of reviewers, followed by the ever mysterious and arbitrary embrace of readers in their multitude ... ”