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Influences

Although Heller always had a desire to be an author from an early age, his own experiences as a bombardier during World War II strongly influenced Catch-22;^[8] however, Heller later said that he had "never had a bad officer."

Czech writer Arnošt Lustig recounts in his book 3x18 that Joseph Heller personally told him that he would never have written Catch-22 had he not first read The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek.^[9]

In 1998, some critics raised the possibility that Heller's book had questionable similarities to Louis Falstein's 1950 novel, Face of a Hero. However, Falstein himself never raised the issue between Catch-22's publication and his death in 1995, and Heller claimed never to have been aware of the obscure novel. Instead, Heller stated that the novel had been influenced by Céline, Waugh and Nabokov. Many of the similarities have been stated to be attributable to the two authors' similar experiences; both served in the U.S. Air Force on bombing crews in Italy in World War II. Their general themes and styles are quite different.^[10]