The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 30 to 21
We don’t think it’s exaggeration to say that Coney Island’s Joseph Heller changed the way America thinks about itself. His masterwork of military absurdity, Catch-22, first published in 1961, tells a story of the Second World War from the manic, paranoid point of view of Air Corps Captain John Yossarian. It was one of the first honest American accounts of the hell of war (even the last just war!) to pervade public consciousness, and gave us a pretty useful way of paraphrasing “shit is fucked.”