''Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy,'' Heller once said. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) defines Catch-22 as ''a condition or consequence that precludes success, a dilemma where the victim cannot win.'' It was up to readers to discover ''Catch-22.'' Heller's novel sold millions of copies and became one of the last works of literature to actually add a new phrase to the language. A critic in The New York Times Book Review called it an ''emotional hodgepodge.'' A reviewer for The New Yorker found the book ''a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.'' Like any work ahead of its time, Heller's novel was destined to embarrass those who hated it. In all, Heller wrote six novels, but none of them resonated as widely or as powerfully as ''Catch-22,'' The novel was made into a movie starring Alan Arkin in 1970 Heller himself did a stage adaptation in 1973 and also published a sequel, ''Closing Time,'' in 1994. Heller based the book on his experience as an Army Air Corps bombardier who flew 60 combat missions over Italy after being born and raised on New York's Coney Island. But he is foiled by regulations, which Doc Daneeka explains: ''Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.'' John Yossarian, is a bombardier who tries to get himself declared crazy so he won't have to fly more missions. ''Catch-22'' gave us war as the worst kind of acid trip, in which reality could be likened to a record spinning so fast the needle is thrown off the vinyl. Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' and Jones' ''From Here to Eternity'' were heavy, earnest novels, stories of war as the young man's unfortunate, but inevitable education.

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