200. Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller's Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man (Scribner, 2000; 233) has been described as a semi-autobiographical story of the author. In this story, Eugene Pota an author in the twilight of his career and of his life, is struggling to write a story that will make him popular and be better than his first book. He is struggling with subjects to write about and the writing style to adopt as almost every theme or subject has already been covered by another writer or by the writer himself. But Eugene is not willing to give up; after all, writing is the only thing he knows how to do. He discusses his works with his agents who are all his age-groups and therefore are in the same 'dying-out' boat as he is. One of the working titles of Pota was The Sexual Biography of My Wife. The parallelism between Eugene Pota and the author, Joseph Heller, is vivid. Just like Joseph Heller, Eugene had had success with his book Catch-22 and no other work of his - Heller's - e...