Catch-22

Joseph Heller got the idea for his famous novel while lying in bed. "It got me so excited that I did what the cliché says you’re supposed to do: I jumped out of bed and paced the floor," he said. The actual writing, though, took a long, long time -- eight years. "Catch-22" sold only 30,000 hardback copies during its first year in America, but it went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom. It was the paperback edition published a year later that made it an American classic, with 10 million copies sold.