Catch-22

VERY GOOD — DUST JACKET: Wear & tear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. Minor chipping to top corners of spine and top outside corners, both panels. Small chip to top edge, back panel. Minor soiling to spine and both panels. Price clipped. BOARDS: Crown and foot of spine worn w/very small tears, primarily the latter. Front and back boards distressed. Scuffs to outside corners. Shelf rubbing to bottom edges, w/very small tear to cloth, back edge, near spine. BOOK: Topstain, w/minor spotting to same. Textblock separation from spine, top. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Joseph Heller's satirical war novel, Catch-22, often cited as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. This is a 1st trade edition, 2nd printing of the work published by Simon & Schuster in 1961. The original dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

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"Catch-22 is one of this century's greatest works of American literature. First published m 1961, Joseph Heller's profound and compelling novel has appeared on nearly every list of must read fiction. It is a classic in every sense of the word. Catch-22 took the war novel genre to a new level, shocking us with its clever and disturbing style.

Set in a World War II American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian, who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. Yossarian is also trying to decode the meaning of Catch-22, a mysterious regulation that proves that insane people are really the sanest, while the supposedly sensible people are the true madmen. And this novel is full of madmen -- Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly m order to finish their tour; Milo Minderbinder, a dedicated entrepreneur who bombs his own airfield when the Germans offer him an extra 6 percent; Major Major Major, whose tragedy in life is that he resembles Henry Fonda; and Major -- de Coverley, whose face is so forbidding no one has dared ask his name.

No novel before or since has matched Catch-22's intensity and brilliance in depicting the brutal insanity of war. Heller satirizes military bureaucracy with bitter, stinging humor, all the while telling the darkly comic story of Yossarian, a bombardier who refuses to die. Nearly forty years later, Yossarian lives"

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Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature. . . .

In the years after its release in paperback in October 1962, . . . , Catch-22 caught the imaginations of many baby boomers, who identified with the novel's anti-war sentiments. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States. The novel's title became a standard term in English and other languages for a dilemma with no easy way out. Now considered a classic, the book was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the century. . . .

After the publication of Catch-22, Heller resumed a part-time academic career as an adjunct professor of creative writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1970s, Heller taught creative writing as a distinguished professor at the City College of New York."

The above text was taken from, respectively, Simon & Shuster publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.