Today in History

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may 01 Learn More Joseph Heller Born


Joseph Heller was born on this day in 1923. The title of his most famous work, Catch-22, has become an English language idiom. It refers to a lose-lose situation where your options conflict with one another—like if you need a car to get to work, but you need a job to save up for a car; that's a catch-22. It was nearly a "catch-18," though. That was Heller's original title for the novel, but his editor thought it was too similar to another war novel, Mila 18, and suggested the number 22 because he thought it was a funny number. (Yep, editors have weird senses of humor.)

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