Yes, Catch-22 Is Banned!

Captain John Yossarian is a World War II bombardier who’s figured out something important: people are trying to kill him. He wants to be grounded from combat missions, but there’s a catch. If you’re crazy, you can be grounded, but asking to be grounded proves you’re sane, which means you have to keep flying. Joseph Heller published the novel in 1961 and gave the English language a phrase for any no-win bureaucratic trap.

In 1972, the Strongsville City School District in Ohio removed Catch-22 from libraries and curricula, along with books by Kurt Vonnegut. Dallas ISD challenged it in 1974, and Snoqualmie Valley, Washington followed in 1979, objecting to the book’s portrayal of women. In 2020, Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District removed it from the curriculum alongside The Great Gatsby and other classics. After community protests, the Strongsville decision was reversed, but the others stuck.

Why You Should Read This

Heller wrote the funniest book about war ever published, and he did it without softening the horror. The novel’s fractured, looping timeline mimics the disorientation of combat. Events repeat with slight variations until a detail that seemed comic the first time turns horrifying the third. The structure is the argument: war breaks narrative logic because it breaks everything.

Catch-22 also taught American literature how to be angry and absurd at the same time. Milo Minderbinder bombing his own squadron for profit, Major Major only accepting visitors when he’s out of his office, the dead man in Yossarian’s tent: Heller built a machine made of jokes that grinds toward something devastating. The book gave us a word for institutional madness. You’ll recognize the catch everywhere once you’ve read it.