Secret collaborators.

• Author: Kostelanetz, Richard
• Position: Briefly Noted - Just One Catch - Brief article - Book review

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Tracy Daugherty, Joseph Heller's first and perhaps last biographer, reports that people who met the man found it hard to believe that such an amiable mensch wrote Catch-22, the classic 1961 anti-war, anti-bureaucracy novel. None of his later writings were nearly as good or beloved.

Critics have long thought that the genius behind Catch22 reflected a collaboration between Heller and an ambitious young Simon & Schuster editor named Robert Gottlieb. The principal...