Catch 22

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.

10 million copies sold in 21 languages: Yossarian lives!

This is a special edition to celebrate 50 years of this unforgettable, exhilarating classic.

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. Joseph Heller's unforgettable novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man’s efforts to survive it.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition celebrates Heller’s masterpiece with an introduction by Howard Jacobson, rare images from Heller’s personal archive and essays by the likes of Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess and Christopher Hitchens.

Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.

About the Author

Joseph Heller was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War and then attended New York University and Columbia University and then Oxford, the last on a Fullbright scholarship. He then taught for two years at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to New York, where he began a successful career in the advertising departments of Time, Look and McCall's magazines. It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. His second novel, Something Happened was published in 1974, Good As Gold in 1979 and Closing Time in 1994. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven.