Joseph Heller grew up in Coney Island, running the boardwalks and funhouses with friends like Sammy Fifteen and Mursch the Hopper. Not long after the end of his childhood, he found himself in the middle of a different sort of craziness; a young air force bombardier spiralling through the flak above wartime Italy, encountering the characters and catastrophes, the absurdity and the terror that he would later translate into CATCH-22. And, after that classic novel changed his life, a third derangement - that of a Coney Island kid in the body of America's Greatest Novelist. This is the life that made CATCH -22, and the life CATCH-22 made.