Mr. Heller said that it took him eight years to write ''Catch-22.'' He acknowledged the influence of Celine, Nathanael West, Nabokov, Faulkner and, in particular, Kafka.

But even after the book was published he could not sustain himself with what he earned as a writer. He lectured at colleges and taught English at the City College of New York. In the 1960's he taught fiction and dramatic writing at Yale University. He also wrote a few television plays and, later in the 60's and early 70's, worked on movie scripts. Among those in which he had a hand were ''Casino Royale'' (1967) and ''Dirty Dingus Magee'' (1970), both spoofs.

Mr. Heller used dialogue from his novel in several adaptations for the theater. A two-act play, ''We Bombed in New Haven,'' was produced at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1967 and reached Broadway a year later for a brief run. ''Catch-22,'' a one-act play, was produced at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1971. ''Clevinger's Trial,'' based on Chapter 8 of ''Catch-22,'' was produced in London in 1974.

Not until 1974, 13 years after publication of ''Catch-22,'' did he produce another novel, ''Something Happened.'' It was about alienation in the American business community and it focused on Bob Slocum, a sad, lackluster careerist with no true friends, dogged by a feeling of always being trapped.

John W. Aldredge, writing in the Saturday Review, said Slocum ''is haunted by the sense that at some time in the past something happened to him, something that he cannot remember but that changed him from a person who had aspirations for the future, who believed in himself and his work, who trusted others and was able to love, into the person he has since unaccountably become, a man who aspires to nothing, believes in nothing and no one, least of all himself, who no longer knows if he loves or is loved.''

Five years after ''Something Happened,'' Mr. Heller's third novel, ''Good as Gold,'' was published. It was a cynical look at the workings of the federal government. ''Just tell the truth,'' an aide to the president says in the book, ''even if you have to lie,'' and the president spends most of his first year in office writing ''My Year in the White House.'' Into the maw of public service comes Bruce Gold, an English professor who wants to become the first real Jewish secretary of state. The fact that Henry A. Kissinger has already served in that capacity does not deter him because he feels that Mr. Kissinger could not possibly be Jewish because he was a party to the Vietnam War.

R. Z. Sheppard, writing in Time magazine, called the book ''a savage, intemperately funny satire on the assimilation of the Jewish tradition of liberalism'' into the American mainstream. ''It is a delicate subject,'' Mr. Sheppard wrote, ''off limits to non-Jews fearful of being thought anti-Semitic and unsettling to successful Jewish intellectuals whose views may have drifted to the right in middle age.''