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:
“One of the most difficult aspects of being a parent during the middle years is feeling powerless to protect our children from hurt. However “growthful” it may be for them to experience failure, disappointment and rejection, it is nearly impossible to maintain an intellectual perspective when our sobbing child or rageful child comes in to us for help. . . . We can’t turn the hurt around by kissing the sore spot to make it better. We are no longer the all-powerful parent.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell (20th century)
“Perhaps you have forgotten me. Dont [sic] you remember a long black fellow who rode on horseback with you from Tremont to Springfield nearly ten years ago, swimming your horses over the Mackinaw on the trip? Well, I am that same one fellow yet.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)