Joseph Heller, American famous author and an Anti-War Activist

Joseph Heller was born May 1st, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York. According to Biography.com "he flew 60 combat missions, before finishing up his studies at Columbia and Oxford and working as an advertising copywriter". The book Catch 22 is written by Joseph Heller and it is a satirical novel in which the story is built off of his own wartime experiences. His book was seen as one of the most significant work of postwar protest literature and it was a huge critical success. Heller originally did not plan for his book to be no longer than a novelette, but after he had been able to add enough substance to it he was beginning to envision that this could be his first novel. According to Wikipedia.com Heller was not very attached to his current work, and said himself that he would not even care to finish the novel if no one would publish it. After a while the work was bought by Simon & Schusters,  in which Heller received US $750 and would receive another US $750 after the work was complete. The deadline for the completion was, however, missed by Heller by around four to five years, but after eight full years Heller finally delivered his work to his publisher. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States, and it created a well known term known as a Catch-22. According to google a catch 22 is known as "a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions."

Heller went on to write several more novels and they were also published, but they never reached the same fame as their predecessor Catch 22. An interesting fact about Joseph Heller‘s method of writing, is that he never started on a story before envisioning both the first and last sentence, that way he would not have to create an ending, but simply create a story between the beginning and end. To me there is a certain brilliance to that method, it says to me that you should not focus on starting to do something and where you will end up, but rather focus on what you do on the journey towards that end. The goal is not the end of the journey, but it is rather the journey that is the goal.