NEW YORK – Fifty years after the publication of “Catch-22,” author Joseph Heller is long dead and his editor has finally gotten around to re-reading it.
“I’m happy to report that I love it,” Robert Gottlieb said Wednesday night before hundreds gathered at the Symphony Space performing arts center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “(But) I kept wanting to edit it. I kept thinking, `How did I let this go by?’”
Gottlieb appeared with two other Heller experts — Mike Nichols and author Christopher Buckley, representing those who met the author in his 30s (Gottlieb), in middle age (Nichols) and in his final years (Buckley).
Interviewed by CBS television correspondent Lesley Stahl, they reminisced about a perpetually anxious, but life-affirming former World War II flyer and advertising man whose dark send-up of war and bureaucracy anticipated the disillusion of Vietnam. The novel that has sold more than 10 million copies, read alike by anti-war protesters and cadets at the Air Force Academy, where the book has long been taught.
Gottlieb was there at the birth, a new and promising editor at Simon & Schuster who convinced executives to give a first-time author and his strange mix of laughter and horror a chance. Gottlieb, who has since worked with such prize-winners as Toni Morrison, Robert Caro and Barbara Tuchman, said he never knew an author so collaborative as Heller.
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