Later Years
Heller returned to St. Catherine's as a visiting Fellow, for a term, in 1991 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.
He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in December 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature."
Read more about this topic: Joseph Heller
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“I was able to believe for years that going to Madame Swann’s was a vague chimera that I would never attain; after having passed a quarter of an hour there, it was the time at which I did not know her which became to me a chimera and vague, as a possible destroyed by another possible.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“So much for Mrs. Hollis’ nine months of pain and 20 years of hope.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Nameless GI, Objective Burma, cutting dog tags off a dead GI (1945)