Catch-22 is a satirical war novel by American author Joseph Heller. It is his debut novel. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961. Often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, it uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from the points of view of different characters. The separate storylines are out of sequence so the timeline develops along with the plot.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the U.S. House of Representatives, and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate.
Bertram Harris Fields was an American lawyer noted for his work in the field of entertainment law. He represented many of the leading film studios, as well as numerous celebrities, and lectured at both Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Fields was also a musician and an author of both fiction and non-fiction books.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein was an American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Silverstein briefly attended university before being drafted into the United States Army. During his rise to prominence in the 1950s, his illustrations were published in various newspapers and magazines, including the adult-oriented Playboy. He also wrote a satirical, adult-oriented alphabet book, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book.
Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s", the book's major themes are feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an aggressively camp sensibility. The controversial book is also "the first instance of a novel in which the main character undergoes a clinical sex-change". Set in Hollywood in the 1960s, the novel also contains candid and irreverent glimpses into the machinations within the film industry.
Something Happened is Joseph Heller's second novel. Its main character and narrator is Bob Slocum, a businessman who engages in a stream of consciousness narrative about his job, his family, his childhood, his sexual escapades, and his own psyche. Although Something Happened failed to achieve the level of renown that Catch-22 did, it has since developed a cult following, with some considering it one of Heller's finest works.
The City and the Pillar is the third published novel by American writer Gore Vidal, written in 1946 and published on January 10, 1948. The story is about a young man who is coming of age and discovers his own homosexuality.
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American cartoonist and author, who at one time was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* is a book by California psychiatrist David Reuben. It was one of the first sex manuals that entered mainstream culture in the 1960s, and had a profound effect on sex education and in liberalizing attitudes towards sex. It was "among the top 20 all-time best sellers of the 20th century in the United States".
Now and Then is Joseph Heller's 1998 memoir. The first half of the memoir focuses on Heller's childhood in Coney Island and is, in fact, as much about the place as it is about the man. Heller describes growing up, his mother and half-siblings in a fundamentally safe and fun neighborhood of punch ball, football, amusement park, and Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Stand.
Edward Irving Wortis, better known by the pen name Avi, is an American author of young adult and children's literature. He is a winner of the Newbery Medal and twice one of the runners-up.
Jay Parini is an American writer and academic. He is known for novels, poetry, biography, screenplays and criticism. He has published novels about Leo Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, Paul the Apostle, and Herman Melville.
Clancy Sigal was an American writer, and the author of dozens of essays and seven books, the best-known of which is the autobiographical novel Going Away (1961).
Creation is an epic historical fiction novel by Gore Vidal published in 1981. In 2002 he published a restored version, reinstating four chapters that a previous editor had cut and adding a brief foreword explaining what had happened and why he had restored the cut chapters.
Live from Golgotha is a novel by Gore Vidal, an irreverent spoof of the New Testament. Told from the perspective of Saint Timothy as he travels with Saint Paul, the 1992 novel's narrative shifts in time as Timothy and Paul combat a mysterious hacker from the future who is deleting all traces of Christianity.
Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Carole Mallory is an American author, actress, former model, teacher and critic who appeared in the films Looking for Mr. Goodbar and The Stepford Wives. She was the nine-year companion of writer Norman Mailer and kept notes and her writings with his edits, selling them to Harvard University in 2008, after his death.
Orville Prescott was the main book reviewer for The New York Times for 24 years.
Two Sisters is a novelistic memoir by the American writer Gore Vidal. Originally published in 1970, this fairly short novel contains, according to the blurb on the dust jacket of the first edition, "Gore Vidal’s singular speculations on love, sex, death, literature and politics."
Thomas Alan Graves is an American journalist, nonfiction writer, and novelist. He is best known as the author of Crossroads, a biography of blues musician Robert Johnson. He is also known for his work as a producer and writer for the film Best of Enemies. He is co-owner of the independent publishing company The Devault-Graves Agency and is a tenured Assistant Professor of English at LeMoyne–Owen College in Memphis.
