Books @60: Catch-22 Helped Shape a Generation's Consciousness

NEW YORK -- Before the 1960s even began, the time's subversive mindset had been imagined in such works as Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road," the early poems of Allen Ginsberg and the manuscript of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22."

Heller started his novel in the 1950s, when he was working in advertising and protest was mostly an underground movement. The book was published in 1961, with no tour to support it and few reviews to alert anyone that a new kind of war story had been told."When 'Catch-22' came out, people were saying, 'Well, World War II wasn't like this,"' E.L. Doctorow, Heller's friend and fellow author, said Monday. "But when we got tangled up in Vietnam, it became a sort of text for the consciousness of that time.

"They say fiction can't change anything, but they can certainly organize a generation's consciousness."

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