Joseph Mitchell

On the centennial of Joseph Mitchell's birth, here is a new edition of the classic collection containing his most celebrated pieces about New York City. Fifty years after its original publication, The Bottom of the Harbor is still considered a fundamental New York book. Every story Mitchell tells, every person he introduces, every scene he describes is illuminated by his passion for the eccentrics and eccentricities of his beloved adopted city.All of the pieces here are connected in one way or another--some directly, some with a kind of mysterious circuitousness--to New York's fabled waterfront, the terrain that Mitchell brilliantly made his own. They tell of a life that has passed--of vacant hotel rooms, deserted communities, once-thriving fishing areas that are now polluted and studded with wrecks. Included are "Up in the Old Hotel," a portrait of Louis Morino, the proprietor of a restaurant called (to his disgust) Sloppy Louie's; "The Rats on the Waterfront," which has inspired countless writers to attempt portraits of these most demonized New Yorkers; and "Mr. Hunter's Grave," widely considered to be the finest single piece of nonfiction to have ever appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.Here is the essential work of a legendary writer.From the Hardcover edition.

Joe Gould's Secret is a 1965 book by Joseph Mitchell, based upon his two New Yorker profiles, Professor Sea Gull (1942) and Joe Gould's Secret (1964). Mitchell's work details the true story of the eponymous Joe Gould, a writer who lived in Greenwich Village in the first half of the 20th century. Gould was an eccentric, bridging the gap between bohemianism and the beat generation, though he was an outspoken critic of both. This criticism alienated him from the social circles of poets, authors, and artists of his time, and instead he focused on documenting the history of what he called the "shirt-sleeved multitude."

"Up in the Old Hotel had its beginnings in the nineteen-thirties, in the hopelessness of the early days of the Great Depression, when Joseph Mitchell, at that time a young newspaper reporter in New York City, gradually became aware that the people be respected the most and got the most pleasure out of interviewing were really pretty strange. "Among them," he once wrote, were visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the-end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy kings and old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks." One of the street preachers was a gloomily eloquent old Southerner named the Reverend Mr. James Jefferson Davis Hall, who carried a WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? sign up and down the sidewalks of the theatrical district, which he called "the belly and the black heart of that Great Whore of Babylon, the city of New York," for a generation; one of the Gypsy kings was King Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, who liked to say that the difference between Gypsies and gajos, or non-Gypsies, is that a Gypsy will steal gasoline out of the tanks of parked automobiles but that a high-class United States politician gajo will steal a whole damned oil well; one of the freak-show freaks was Jane Barnell, billed as Lady Olga, who was the Bearded Lady in Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus on Forty-second Street and who was a legend in the freak-show world because of her imaginatively sarcastic and sometimes imaginatively obscene and sometimes imaginatively brutal remarks about people in freak-show audiences delivered deadpan and sotto voce to her fellow freaks gathered about her on the platform. These people were extraordinarily dissimilar, but all of them, each and every one of them, protected themselves and kept themselves going by the use of a kind of humor that Mitchell thought of as graveyard humor, and he admired them for this. Even the Reverend Hall depended on this kind of humor to get his points across, and some of his gloomiest sermons were at the same time comic masterpieces. Mitchell could write only briefly about these people in newspapers, but he kept in touch with some of them, and later on, when he joined the staff of The New Yorker, he wrote full-scale "Profiles" of them. At The New Yorker, as time went on, he turned to writing about more conventional people--a great variety of them--only to find that if they were asked the right questions, and if their answers were closely listened to, even the most conventional of them were also apt to turn out to be really quite strange. And, amazingly, he discovered that a large proportion of them, after seeking over and over to find some meaning in their lives and finding only meaninglessness, had also learned to console themselves with graveyard humor." "Between 1943 and 1965, four collections of Mitchell's stories from The New Yorker were published--McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor and Joe Gould's Secret. All of these books have been out of print for years, and all of them, with some previously uncollected stories added to McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, are included in this book. Through the years, a succession of literary critics have written essays on Mitchell's stories, extolling his prose, remarking on the dazzling diversity of his subjects, and exploring the darkness that they profess to discern underneath his humor. Some of Mitchell's colleagues at The New Yorker believe that his "Profiles" and "Reporter at Large" articles are among the best the magazine has ever published and are among the ones most likely to endure. One of his colleagues, Calvin Trillin, dedicated a book to him, stating "To the New Yorker reporter who set the standard--Joseph Mitchell.""--BOOK JACKET.

New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life. "King of the Gypsies" sets out to describe the spokesman of 38 gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon's decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also more imaginative than recent novels. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that resembles Dickens'.--From Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic.

"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 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 death in 1996."--BOOK JACKET.

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Contents The girls in their summer dresses by Irwin Shaw Over the river and through the wood by John O'Hara The secret life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber The net by Robert M. Coates Home atmosphere by Sally Benson A toast to Captain Jerk by Russell Maloney Kroy Wen by Kay Boyle Nice girl by Sherwood Anderson HYMAN KAPLA*N, samaritan by Leonard Q. Ross Prelude to reunion by Oliver La Farge A small day by Erskine Caldwell Midsummer by Nancy Hale The door by E.B. White Tourist home by Benedict Thielen Arrangement in black and white by Dorothy Parker The courtship of Milton Barker by Wolcott Gibbs Homecoming by William Maxwell Only the dead know Brooklyn by Thomas Wolfe The works by Nathan Asch Do you like it here? by John O'Hara Conversation piece by Louise Bogan The fury by Robert M. Coates Venetian perspective by Janet Flanner Ping-pong by St. Clair McKelway The three veterans by Leane Zugsmith Wet Saturday by John Collier Soldiers of the republic by Dorothy Parker Houseparty by Walter Bernstein All the years of her life by Morley Callaghan The explorers by Jerome Weidman The old lady by Thyra Samter Winslow A matter of pride by Christopher La Farge Love in the snow by Joel Sayre. Profession : housewife by Sally Benson The great manta by Edwin Corle My sister Frances by Emily Hahn Accident near Charlottesburg by William A. Krauss In honor of their daughter by John Mosher The test by Angelica Gibbs Goodbye, Shirley Temple by Joseph Mitchell Honors and awards by James Reid Parker Pastoral at Mr. Piper's by Mollie Panter-Downes Man and woman by Erskine Caldwell Main currents of American thought by Irwin Shaw The knife by Brendan Gill The pelican's shadow by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Incident on a street corner by Albert Maltz Such a pretty day by Dawn Powell Portrait of ladies by Mark Shorer Parochial school by Paul Horgan I am waiting by Christopher Isherwood A letter from the Bronx by Arthur Kober Little woman by Sally Benson The apostate by George Milburn Sailor off the Bremen by Irwin Shaw Barmecide's feast by Marc Connelly Fish story by Donald Moffat I've got an anchor on my chest by R.H. Newman The happiest days by John Cheever Black boy by Kay Boyle The nice Judge Trowbridge by Richard Lockridge Love in Brooklyn by Daniel Fuchs The great-grandmother by Nancy Hale Chutzbah by Jerome Weidman Mr. Palmer's party by Tess Slesinger A different world by Robert M. Coates Are we leaving tomorrow? by John O'Hara The getaway by Dorothy Thomas.