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:
“That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)