Joseph Mitchell - Bibliography

View Larger
Image

My Ears Are Bent

Joseph Mitchell

In the fall of 1929 a young man from a small farming town in the swamp country of North Carolina arrived in New York City. Because of a preternatural inaptitude for mathematics, he had failed to receive a college degree from the University of North Carolina and suffered the added misfortune of arriving in the big city at the moment of the stock market crash. For the next eight years, except for a brief period when he got sick of the whole business and went to sea on a freighter to Leningrad, Joseph Mitchell worked first at The World, then as a district man at The Herald Tribune, and then as a reporter and feature writer at The World-Telegram. He covered the criminal courts, Tammany Hall politicians, major murder trials, and the Lindbergh kidnapping. He wrote multi-part profiles of notable figures of the day, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, and Franz Boas. His byline, appearing two or three times a day in The World-Telegram, would become familiar to almost four hundred thousand readers. But Mitchell discovered that it was not the politicians, business leaders, or noted celebrities of the day that he got the most pleasure out of interviewing, but people whose talk was “artless, the talk of the people trying to reassure or comfort themselves . . . talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.” He began to frequent gymnasiums, speakeasies, and burlesque houses. He visited storefront churches in Harlem, covered the waterfront, and spent time at the Fulton Fish Market. Fascinated by the bizarre and the strange, he would become, in the words of Stanley Walker, his noted editor at The Herald Tribune, “one of the best newspaper reporters in the city.” In January 1938, My Ears Are Bent, a collection of Mitchell’s newspaper pieces, was published. That book, unavailable for more than sixty years, is now restored to print. A few months after the book’s original publication, Mitchell joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he remained until his death in 1996.

More About this Book

Other editions: Softcover - 2008

View Larger
Image

The Bottom of the Harbor

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Old Mr. Flood

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

Other editions: Softcover - 2005

View Larger
Image

McSorley's Wonderful Saloon

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Easy Spanish for Construction

Joseph Mitchell; Hamilton Mitchell

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

Joe Gould's Secret

Joseph Mitchell

Now a major motion picture starring Ian Holm, Hope Davis, and Stanley Tucci, who also directs.

Joseph Mitchell was a legendary New Yorker writer and the author of the national bestseller Up in the Old Hotel, in which these two pieces appeared. What Joseph Mitchell wrote about, principally, was New York. In Joe Gould, Mitchell found the perfect subject. And Joe Gould's Secret has become a legendary piece of New York history.

Joe Gould may have been the quintessential Greenwich Village bohemian. In 1916, he left behind patrician roots for a scrappy, hand-to-mouth existence: he wore ragtag clothes, slept in Bowery flophouses, and mooched food, drinks, and money off of friends and strangers. Thus he was able to devote his energies to writing "An Oral History of Our Time," which Gould said would constitute "the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude." But when Joe Gould died in 1957, the manuscript could not be found. Where had he hidden it? This is Joe Gould's Secret.

"[Mitchell is] one of our finest journalists."--Dawn Powell, The Washington Post

"What people say is history--Joe Gould was right about that-- and history, when recorded by Mitchell, is literature."--The New Criterion

More About this Book

Other editions: Hardcover - 2000, Hardcover - 1996, Hardcover - 1996

View Larger
Image

Decisive Battles Of The Civil War

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

View Larger
Image

The Bottom of the Harbor

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

Up in the Old Hotel: And Other Stories

Joseph Mitchell

More About this Book

Annals of the Civil War/Decisive Battles of the Civil War/a Treasury of Civil War Tales/Killer Angels

Joseph Mitchell; Michael Shaara; Webb Garrison

More About this Book

Apologies to the Iroquois

Joseph Mitchell; Edmund Wilson

More About this Book