Catch-22 is set in the closing months of World War II, in an American bomber squadron on a small island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. (He has decided to live forever even if he has to die in the attempt.) Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to someone dangerously sane.

"I believe that Joseph Heller is one of the most extraordinary talents now among us.... Despite some of the most outrageous sequences since A Night at the Opera, Catch-22 is an intensely serious work.''    —Robert Brustein