Joseph Heller

We remember novelist Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22" which became an American classic. He died Sunday night at the age of 76, from a heart attack. (REBROADCAST from 1/29/88)

Novelist Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, Something Happened and No Laughing Matter, his 1985 account of being stricken with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a neurological disease in which the peripheral nervous system is attacked. Within two weeks of the first symptoms, Heller could hardly breathe or swallow. It took him two years to relearn his basic motor functions. Heller's best known work is still his first, Catch 22, a satire of the military bureaucracy and the madness of war.