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Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
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Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury Hardcover - 1995

by Joseph Heller; Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury

Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. National ads/media.


About this book

Catch-22 is Joseph Heller’s first novel and his most acclaimed work. Set during World War II, the novel uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, mainly focusing on the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Occasionally, the narrator also shows us how other characters, such as the chaplain or Hungry Joe, experience the world around them. As the novel’s events are described from the different points of view through separate out-of-sequence storylines, the timeline of Catch-22 develops along with the plot.

The novel's title refers to a plot device that is repeatedly invoked in the story. Catch-22 starts as a set of paradoxical requirements whereby airmen mentally unfit to fly did not have to, but could not actually be excused. By the end of the novel, the phrase is invoked as the explanation for many unreasonable restrictions. “Catch-22” has since entered the English language and can be understood as an unsolvable logic puzzle, a difficult situation from which there is no escape.

Upon publication, the book was not a best seller in the United States. It was merely a cult favorite until the publication of the paperback edition in 1962, which set record sales — most likely benefitting from a national debate about the pointlessness of the Vietnam War. Catch-22 has since been ranked as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library, one of the 20th century's top 100 novels by the Radcliffe Publishing Course, and one of the 100 greatest novels of all time by The Observer. 

From the publisher

Named one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller's masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War's Italian theater features a gallery of magnificently strange characters seething with comic energy. The malingering hero, Yossarian, is endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war, and his story is studded with incidents and devices (including the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule that gives the book its title) that propel the narrative in a headlong satiric rush. But the reason Catch-22's satire never weakens and its jokes never date stems not from the comedy itself but from the savage, unerring, Swiftian indignation out of which that comedy springs. This fractured anti-epic, with all its aggrieved humanity, has given us the most enduring image we have of modern warfare. This hardcover Everyman's Library edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, a chronology of the author's life and times, and a select bibliography. It is printed on acid-free paper, with sewn bindings, full-cloth covers, foil stamping, and a silk ribbon marker.

First Edition Identification

Simon & Schuster first published Catch-22 in June of 1961. The first edition is bound in blue cloth, the top edges of its pages are stained red, and the statement “First Printing” appears on the copyright page. The dust jacket of the first edition has the original $5.95 price on the bottom of the front flap and author's picture on the back panel with no blurbs.

Details

  • Title Catch-22: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
  • Author Joseph Heller; Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition First Thus
  • Pages 624
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Everyman's Library, New York
  • Date 1995-10-17
  • ISBN 9780679437222 / 0679437223
  • Weight 1.42 lbs (0.64 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.4 x 5.28 x 1.37 in (21.34 x 13.41 x 3.48 cm)
  • Reading level 1140
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1940's
  • Library of Congress subjects War stories, World War, 1939-1945
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 95234876
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Media reviews

“Vulgarly, savagely, bitterly funny . . . A dazzling performance.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES

“An extraordinary book . . . of enormous richness and art, of deep thought and brilliant writing.”
—THE SPECTATOR

“Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.”
—THE NATION

“An original. There's no book like it anyone has read . . . Heller is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him.”
—Norman Mailer

“Explosive, subversive, brilliant . . . One of the most bitterly funny books in the language.”
—THE NEW REPUBLIC

Citations

  • Library Journal, 01/01/1996, Page 150

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, Columbia, and Oxford University, the last on a Fulbright scholarship. He 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. Joseph Heller died in 1999.
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New York: Everyman's Library / Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Everyman's Library printing. Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. Fine in a faintly worn, else fine dust jacket. The author's first novel, whose satiric anti-war attitude set the tone for the 1960s, and whose title quickly became part of the language.
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