Newswise — INDIANAPOLIS- Simon & Schuster's new 50th anniversary edition of Joseph Heller's classic novel, "Catch-22," contains more than 50 pages of historical and literary material prepared by Jonathan R. Eller, professor of English in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI, www.iupui.edu).
Eller met Joseph Heller during the mid-1980s, and in 1992, with Heller's encouragement, he published a 17,000-word history of the novel's unexpected rise to cultural prominence in the early 1960s. Heller provided comments and corrected a draft of this monograph.
The new edition of "Catch-22" is expected to extend "Catch-22's" enduring reputation as one of the most important mid-century American novels, a brilliant satire of World War II and postwar American culture. In recent years, "Catch 22" has been named to "best novels" lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library and the London Observer.
Eller, senior textual editor of the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, wrote a historical essay for the "Catch-22" anniversary edition and selected companion articles by major authors who were also early Catch-22 fans, including Nelson Algren, Anthony Burgess, and Norman Mailer.
The IUPUI professor’s section of the book also includes personal essays on the genesis of "Catch 22"; manuscript pages and photos from the Joseph Heller archival collections at Brandeis University; and a selection of advertisements from the original publishing campaign.
Simon & Schuster's editorial staff had kept a reference copy of Eller's 1992 monograph. In September 2010, as house editors prepared for the 50th anniversary edition, a senior editor contacted Eller to see if he would plan and edit the new edition's historical sections. The work was completed during the winter, and the new edition of "Catch-22" was released in May of this year.
In his primary duties with the Institute for American Thought, Eller works to publish volumes of the Writings of C. S. Peirce, the Works of George Santayana, and the Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury.
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