Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of Joseph Heller. His life was filled with romantic indiscretions, but he was perhaps more famous for his friendships--he counted Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, and many others among his confidantes.
A "NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW" EDITORS' CHOICE During his fifty-eight-year lifetime Donald Barthelme published more than one hundred short stories in The New Yorker and authored sixteen books. He was a contemporary and friend of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, and Norman Mailer, and has received recent tributes from Dave Eggers and George Saunders. He had a volatile private life and his search for a place in American letters took him across the country, briefly to Denmark, and through a host of occupations. When he wasn't hiding, he was passionately searching and living. Barthelme's writing is a found-art-style mix of pop culture and high literature that is surprisingly funny and playful. This "excellent biography" ("The New Yorker") "pursue[s] Barthelme's art to its shuddering core. . . . The enthusiasm is catching" ("The Wall Street Journal").