Like any work ahead of its time, Heller’s novel was destined to embarrass those who hated it. In all, Heller wrote six novels, but none of them resonated as widely or as powerfully as ``Catch-22,″ The novel was made into a movie starring Alan Arkin in 1970 Heller himself did a stage adaptation in 1973 and also published a sequel, ``Closing Time,″ in 1994. Heller based the book on his experience as an Army Air Corps bombardier who flew 60 combat missions over Italy after being born and raised on New York’s Coney Island.

But he is foiled by regulations, which Doc Daneeka explains: ``Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.″ John Yossarian, is a bombardier who tries to get himself declared crazy so he won’t have to fly more missions. ``Catch-22″ gave us war as the worst kind of acid trip, in which reality could be likened to a record spinning so fast the needle is thrown off the vinyl. Mailer’s ``The Naked and the Dead″ and Jones’ ``From Here to Eternity″ were heavy, earnest novels, stories of war as the young man’s unfortunate, but inevitable education. Heller wasn’t the first author of his generation to suggest that war was a less than heroic affair _ Norman Mailer and James Jones had both famously done so _ but he was the first to capture a special kind of madness. ``They say fiction can’t change anything, but they can certainly organize a generation’s consciousness.″ ``But when we got tangled up in Vietnam, it became a sort of text for the consciousness of that time. Doctorow, Heller’s friend and fellow author, said Monday. ``When `Catch-22′ came out, people were saying, `Well, World War II wasn’t like this,‴ E.L. The book was published in 1961, with no tour to support it and few reviews to alert anyone that a new kind of war story had been told. Heller, who died Sunday of a heart attack at age 76, started his novel in the 1950s, when he was working in advertising and protest was mostly an underground movement.

NEW YORK (AP) _ Before the 1960s even began, the time’s subversive mindset had been imagined in such works as Jack Kerouac’s novel ``On the Road,″ the early poems of Allen Ginsberg and the manuscript of Joseph Heller’s ``Catch-22.″

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