All this week I’ve been bringing you vintage interviews with authors whose books were made into major Hollywood movies like “Jurassic Park,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” and “The Queen of the Damned.”
Today, a renowned author who accomplished something very rare: he actually added a whole new phrase to our popular lexicon.
Joseph Heller first published his iconic novel “Catch-22” in 1961. It’s a satirical war story that introduced us to the concept of a “catch 22,” which is defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule.”
I had interviewed Joseph Heller once before, when he wrote a sequel to “Catch-22” called “Closing Time.” Then we talked again in 1996 about “Catch-22″…
The movie “Catch-22” premiered in 1970, with an all-star cast that included Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam. Richard Benjamin, even Art Garfunkel.
Joseph Heller died 1999, at the age of 76.