Author Guide · Satirical Fiction
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Joseph Heller flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier over Italy in the Second World War. Sixteen years later he turned them into Catch-22, published on 10 October 1961. It sold about 12,000 hardcover copies by Thanksgiving and never made The New York Times bestseller list; then the 1962 paperback sold 1.1 million copies in seven months, and the book has since sold more than ten million. Its title became an English phrase. Heller spent the next 38 years writing novels about office life, Washington, King David, Rembrandt and, finally, an old novelist trying to write one more great book. This guide covers his ten key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1961–2003 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Joseph Heller published seven novels, two memoirs and three plays, plus a posthumous collection. His best-known book is Catch-22 (1961), followed by Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979) and God Knows (1984). Start with Catch-22; its sequel, Closing Time (1994), and his memoir Now and Then (1998) show where it came from and what happened to its characters.
Where to Start with Joseph Heller
If you want the book that made his name
→ Catch-22 (1961) — the 1961 war satire that gave English a phrase.
If you want office life instead of war
→ Something Happened (1974) — one executive’s monologue, 13 years later.
If you want a satire of Washington
→ Good as Gold (1979) — a professor offered a job in government.
If you want the man behind it
→ Now and Then (1998) — Coney Island, the war and the writing of Catch-22.
10 Joseph Heller Books, in Order
Catch-22
Captain John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa between 1942 and 1944, wants only to stay alive, while his colonels keep raising the number of missions the men must fly. The catch of the title: a man who asks to be grounded for insanity proves he is sane. Reviews were mixed and it lost the 1962 National Book Award to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, but it went to No. 1 in Britain and the Modern Library later ranked it seventh among the century’s English-language novels. Mike Nichols filmed it in 1970; George Clooney produced a Hulu miniseries in 2019.
Something Happened
Thirteen years after Catch-22, a long first-person monologue by Bob Slocum, a mid-level executive at an unnamed company waiting for a promotion, unhappy with his wife and uneasy with his three children. The story jumps between periods of his life and he may be imagining some of it; the “something” arrives in the last pages. Kurt Vonnegut called it “splendidly put together and hypnotic to read”; Jonathan Franzen has said he prefers it to Catch-22.
Good as Gold
Bruce Gold, a middle-aged Jewish English professor with an unhappy marriage and a family that ignores him, writes a favourable review of the President’s book and is offered the chance to become the first Jewish Secretary of State, on condition that he divorces his wife and marries the daughter of an anti-Semitic elder statesman. Critics saw it as a return to the wordplay of Catch-22; Gore Vidal named it among his five favourite post-war novels.
God Knows
The biblical King David, old and on his deathbed, tells his own life: the sheep, Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and Uriah, Absalom and Solomon. He seems to know about things that came later, such as Michelangelo’s statue of him. Mordecai Richler wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Heller was “dancing at the top of his form again”.
No Laughing Matter
In December 1981 Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome and left temporarily paralysed, first in intensive care at Mount Sinai, then at the Rusk Institute. He wrote the account with his friend Speed Vogel. Valerie Humphries, one of the nurses who cared for him, later became his second wife.
Picture This
A novel built around Rembrandt’s painting Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, moving between Athens in its golden age, 17th-century Holland and modern America. Aristotle, Socrates and Rembrandt all appear, and the book keeps drawing the parallel between the rise and fall of Athens and the United States.
Closing Time
Billed as the sequel to Catch-22, 33 years on: Yossarian is old and well off, Milo Minderbinder is a rich arms dealer, and the chaplain Tappman has his own trouble with the military. New characters include Sammy Singer, a Jewish boy from Coney Island who served in the war. New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where a society wedding is planned, is at the centre of the book.
Now and Then
Heller’s memoir. The first half is his childhood in Coney Island, with the amusement park and Nathan’s; the rest covers his jobs as a telegram messenger and blacksmith’s helper, his war as a bombardier and the men who ended up in Catch-22, college on the G.I. Bill, and the writing of Catch-22 and Something Happened.
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
Published six months after his death. Eugene Pota, an ageing, famous novelist, tries to write one last book as good as his early ones, and the novel collects his drafts and ideas, from a sexual biography of his wife to a story about Hera’s troubles with Zeus. Michiko Kakutani called it “a sad coda to a distinguished career”; Tim Adams in The Guardian called it a “caustic self-parody”.
Catch as Catch Can
A posthumous collection edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker: his early short stories, among them “Castle of Snow” and “A Man Named Flute”, and “Yossarian Survives”, along with essays about Catch-22 such as “Catch-22 Revisited”.
In What Order to Read Joseph Heller
Heller wrote only one series: Closing Time (1994) brings back Yossarian, Milo and the chaplain from Catch-22, so read Catch-22 first. Everything else stands alone and can be read in any order.
Reading in publication order shows the shape of his career: the war, then the office (Something Happened), then Washington (Good as Gold), then history and the Bible, and finally himself, in the memoir Now and Then and the last novel about an old writer measured against his first book.
A reading path
1. Catch-22 (1961)
2. Something Happened (1974)
3. God Knows (1984)
4. Closing Time (1994)
5. Now and Then (1998)
Everything Else Joseph Heller Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 3 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Plays
3
3 books · 1967–1973
- 1967We Bombed in New Havenpremiered at Yale with Stacy Keach, then on Broadway with Jason Robards
- 1971Catch-22: A Dramatizationhis stage version of the novel
- 1973Clevinger’s Triala one-act play drawn from a chapter of Catch-22
The years · 1923–1999
Quick facts about Joseph Heller
- Known for
- He is known for Catch-22 (1961), the Second World War satire whose title became the everyday English name for a rule you cannot win against.
- 1923
- Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn
- 1942
- Joins the US Army Air Corps
- 1961
- Catch-22
- 1994
- Closing Time
- 1999
- Dies in East Hampton, New York
- Born
- 1 May 1923, Coney Island, Brooklyn; his parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia
- Died
- 12 December 1999, East Hampton, New York, of a heart attack, aged 76
- War
- B-25 bombardier, 488th Bombardment Squadron, 60 combat missions on the Italian front
- Education
- New York University (BA, 1948), Columbia (MA, 1949), then a Fulbright year at Oxford
- Worked
- Taught at Penn State (1950–52); then Time, Look and McCall’s
- Illness
- Guillain–Barré syndrome, diagnosed December 1981
- Recognition
- Catch-22 ranked No. 7 on the Modern Library list of the century’s best novels
The red mark is 1961: Catch-22, the novel that made his name.
How Joseph Heller Writes: Logic Turned Against Itself
Heller’s comedy runs on rules that defeat themselves. The catch in Catch-22 is the clearest case: a pilot can be grounded if he is crazy, but asking to be grounded proves he is sane. The novel repeats the same trap in conversations, orders and paperwork until the jokes stop being funny and become frightening, which is the point.
He rarely tells a story in a straight line. Catch-22 moves back and forth in time, with chapters named after characters, and keeps returning to one scene, the death of Snowden, revealing a little more each time. Something Happened drops the cast altogether for one man’s circling monologue, and God Knows gives the Bible to a narrator who talks like a modern New Yorker.
Much of the material is his own life. He flew 60 missions as a bombardier, like Yossarian; he worked in magazine offices before writing about Bob Slocum’s company; Sammy Singer in Closing Time grows up in Coney Island, as Heller did; and Eugene Pota, the old novelist of his last book, is trying to write something to match his famous early work, as Heller was asked to do for nearly four decades.
Watch
Joseph Heller on The Book Programme (1974)
Robert Robinson interviews Joseph Heller for BBC Two’s The Book Programme in 1974, at his New York apartment and his City College office, about the success of Catch-22, his second novel Something Happened and whether writing can be taught. From the official BBC Archive channel.
Frequently asked questions about Joseph Heller’s books
How many books has Joseph Heller written?
Thirteen under his name: seven novels, two memoirs (No Laughing Matter, with Speed Vogel, and Now and Then), three plays and a posthumous collection, Catch as Catch Can (2003). The ten key books are on this page; the plays are listed separately.
What are Joseph Heller’s books in order?
Catch-22 (1961), Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), No Laughing Matter (1986), Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994), Now and Then (1998), Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000) and Catch as Catch Can (2003).
Where should I start with Joseph Heller?
With Catch-22. It is his best-known book, and Closing Time and Now and Then both assume you know it. If you liked it and want something different, try Something Happened or Good as Gold next.
What is Joseph Heller’s most famous book?
Catch-22 (1961). It has sold more than ten million copies, the Modern Library ranked it seventh among the best English-language novels of the 20th century, and its title is now a common phrase for a problem whose only solution is ruled out by the problem itself.
Is Catch-22 based on Joseph Heller’s own experience?
Partly. Heller was a B-25 bombardier with the 488th Bombardment Squadron in Italy and flew 60 combat missions. Yossarian is also a B-25 bombardier, based on the island of Pianosa, and ends the novel with 71 missions. In Now and Then Heller describes the men and events that found their way into the book.
Why is it called Catch-22 and not Catch-18?
The first chapter appeared in 1955 in New World Writing as “Catch-18”. Shortly before publication in 1961, his agent Candida Donadio asked him to change the number to avoid confusion with Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18; the editor Robert Gottlieb is reported to have suggested 22.
Is there a sequel to Catch-22?
Yes: Closing Time (1994), which follows Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder and the chaplain Tappman into old age in New York, with new characters such as Sammy Singer.
Has Catch-22 been adapted?
Twice on screen: a 1970 film directed by Mike Nichols, with Alan Arkin as Yossarian and Orson Welles as General Dreedle, and a six-part 2019 miniseries produced by and co-starring George Clooney, with Christopher Abbott as Yossarian, on Hulu and Channel 4. Heller also wrote a stage version in 1971.
Was Catch-22 plagiarised?
In 1998 some critics pointed to similarities with Louis Falstein’s novel Face of a Hero, about an American airman in Italy. Falstein had never raised the matter before his death in 1995, and Heller said he had never read the book or heard of its author. Both men served as aircrew in Italy, which may explain the overlap.
Is Joseph Heller still alive?
No. He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, New York, on 12 December 1999, aged 76, shortly after finishing Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, which was published in 2000.
Footnotes
- Joseph Heller — Wikipedia
- Catch-22 — Wikipedia
- Something Happened — Wikipedia
- God Knows (novel) — Wikipedia
- A New Satire in ‘Catch-22’ Sequel — The Christian Science Monitor, 1994
- Kurt Vonnegut on Joseph Heller and having enough — The Marginalian
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“It was love at first sight.”
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961), the first line
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