The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media: "It's the birthday of Joseph Heller, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1923). He's best known for his novel Catch-22 (1961), about a World War II bomber pilot, Yossarian, who believes that the world is out to get him killed. The entire German army wants to shoot him down, and the men that are supposedly his countrymen keep sending him out on bombing missions, where he is likely to get shot down by those Germans. He spends all his time trying to get himself declared insane so he can stop flying bombing missions, but there is a regulation called Catch-22, which says that if you want out of combat duty you can't be crazy.
Heller wrote, '[A pilot] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'"
The longer I live, the more convinced I am that Catch-22 is a great novel.
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