STARKEY: henderson, it's yours but to do as you're told. i got the WORST deja vu reading this because the first half reads eerily like a play i wrote two years ago that heavily references both catch-22 and journey's end – the former being, of course, written by joseph heller, the latter LITERALLY being referenced by one of the ''actors'' in this play as having been a past role of his, i'm guessing raleigh, who is LITERALLY the character i was referencing in my play HELP – and it only got more haunting as the play went on. it's all the craziness of catch-22 but condensed into a post-modern meta-narrative confined to the space of a small stage, where, in my opinion, the small space only exacerbates the insanity of the plot. what happens to sinclair's 'actor' in the 'narrative' of the play :-) sweats nervously :-)Īlso btw this play is literally insane. serendipity of the highest order! my copy was clearly used by someone actually performing the play (all of sinclair's lines were underlined, some extra, ad-libbed lines were written in the margins, etc.) which was extraordinarily haunting considering. People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs.'įinding this super obscure play that i've been waiting ages to read at the used bookstore where i work, and for less than $3. You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it.' On his return home he 'felt like a hero. Heller later remembered the war as 'fun in the beginning. Two years later he was sent to Italy, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. He sent it to New York Daily News, which rejected it. Even as a child, he loved to write at the age of eleven, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland. Joseph Heller was the son of poor Jewish parents from Russia. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Joseph heller goodreads