It’s Joseph Heller’s birthday today. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and died in East Hampton, New York, in 1999 and in between he wrote Catch-22 in 1961, based on his experiences in WWII. Heller was stationed on Corsica off the Italian coast and sent on bombing runs. He claimed that he was “too stupid to be afraid” until his 37th mission, when he saw friends’ planes going down. He flew a total of 60 missions before the end of the war.

Catch-22 received mixed reviews for being funny and passionate but lacking in craftsmanship. It was slow to catch on with readers as well, but by the mid-60s, the book was a cult favorite with students protesting the Vietnam War. Catch-22 in the novel refers to a military regulation that says a man is insane if he’s willing to fly dangerous missions, but the very act of requesting to be relieved of such missions proves he’s sane; that’s the “catch.” Thanks to the novel, Merriam-Webster now defines a “catch-22” as “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule.”

(By the way: if a dictionary tells you it’s Webster’s without the Merriam, just keep on walking. They are not the real McCoy. Merriam-Webster defines “the real McCoy” as “something or someone that is real or genuine; something or someone that is not a copy or imitation.”)

Heller graduated from New York University in 1948, got a Master’s in lit from Columbia University, and then won a Fulbright and studied at Oxford in 1950. He then did some teaching and working advertising for some years while getting stories published in Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and like that. His other novels, including the best-selling God Knows (1984), were sometimes well-received but never as successful as Catch-22, and when told once that he’d never written anything else as good as Catch-22, Heller responded, “Who has?” He died at 76 of a heart attack, survived by his second wife and two children from his first marriage.

Be sane and safe and happy and warm today and stay scrupulously honest to the data.