In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, Graham Foster gets the intel on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from our guest, academic and writer Spencer Morrison.

Catch-22 takes us back to the dying days of the Second World War and introduces us to Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier who is stationed on an island off the coast of Italy. Yossarian’s traumatic missions are contrasted with his life on the base, which is populated by various oddball airmen who all have their own agendas. They are overseen by commanding officers who are more concerned with abstract bureaucracy and arbitrary rules than the reality of the war. When Yossarian attempts to get out of flying any more missions he is faced with the most insidious rule of all, Catch-22, which states if an airman flies missions he is crazy and doesn’t have to, but if he doesn’t want to fly missions then he is sane and has to.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1942, he joined the US Air Force and served as a bombardier on the Italian Front, his experiences informing Catch-22. His first published story appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1948 while he was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm. He went on to write seven novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, three screenplays and two volumes of autobiography. In the 1970s he worked alongside Anthony Burgess in the Creative Writing department at City College New York. He died in 1999.

Spencer Morrison is an assistant professor of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where he specializes in post-WWII American literature. His writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and Genre, and he’s currently completing a book manuscript on fifties and sixties American literature and culture that includes a chapter on Joseph Heller.

Books mentioned in this episode

By Joseph Heller:

• Something Happened (1974)

By others:

• The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)
• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)
• The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)
• The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (1950)
• From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)
• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (1952)
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)
• The Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956)
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)
• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

(This page contains affiliate links which help support the work of the Burgess Foundation)

In previous series of Ninety-Nine Novels, we learnt about authors including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood, among others. These episodes are available at your favourite place to get podcasts.

You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess’s list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to this podcast below or on your audio platform of choice (Apple Podcasts / Soundcloud / Spotify/ YouTube), or use the streaming links below.

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

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