Catch-22's first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was eighteen when I first read Joseph Heller's stunning work 'Catch-22,' and was at that time close to being drafted for the fruitless and unenlightened war in Viet Nam.
I cited 'Catch-22' as a landmark film and one of my favourites.
Catch-22's admirers cross boundaries - ideological, generational, geographical.
It wasn't until my teenage years that a book really left a mark, and that was George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' It was on the syllabus at school when I was about 16, and I went on to read more of his books. It was the height of the Cold War, so a lot of the messages really resonated at the time.
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'
I was in Kenya when I read 'Catch-22,' and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya - whenever I think of 'Catch-22,' I think of Nairobi.
World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.
I was a precocious reader.
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.