Joseph Heller

Raised in working-class Coney Island by Jewish immigrant parents, Heller enlisted at nineteen and flew sixty bombing missions over Italy and France, far fewer near-misses than Yossarian's paranoia later claimed, he insisted, though one mission did convince him someone really was trying to kill him. The GI Bill sent him to NYU and Columbia; a day job in advertising, writing copy for Time and McCall's, paid the bills while he spent eight years drafting Catch-22 in the evenings.

The novel sold slowly at first, then found its readership among a generation fighting a war in Vietnam that made its logic feel less like satire than reportage. In 1981 he was struck by Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disorder, and wrote about the ordeal (and the friends who nursed him through it) in a wry memoir, No Laughing Matter.