The 3 best books by Joseph Mitchell

There was a time when journalistic chroniclers wrote reality literature. Beyond offering critical thinking, guys like Joseph Mitchell or even Hemingway o faulkner they became essential writers who transmuted between realistic narratives, with which to fill columns towards the everyday epic, or novels already overwhelmed towards much more complex assumptions in form and content.

For the part that corresponds to Joseph Mitchell, his narrative cosmos was located in that legendary New York as a paradigm of the XNUMXth century leaning on modernity with all its edges. Epicenter to arouse cultures with their conflicts, their lights and their shadows.

The same Tom wolfe he found in Mitchell that clear reference from which to abound in urban settings loaded with disparity of focuses and perceptions. An inexhaustible source from which to compose the most necessary stories to understand a XNUMXth century where large cities aroused artistic and human essences.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Joseph Mitchell

Joe Gould's Secret

The most human landscape of large cities always offers fascinating visions. Those that make us stop looking at the exuberance of a character charged with unusual color among the gray mediocrity. That was Joe Gould's secret, perhaps without knowing it himself. Because he did not intend to focus attention but divert it towards visions that escape between that apparent gray.

Who was this Joseph Ferdinand Gould, the candid and disturbing protagonist of these sketches? The son of one of the most traditional families in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard, in 1916 he broke with all the ties and traditions of New England and left for New York, where shortly after he began to beg.

His declared goal was to write a work, a monumental Oral History of Our Time, in which he would collect thousands of dialogues, biographies, and portraits of the human anthill in Manhattan. Ezra Pound and EE Cummings, among many others, became interested in the project and even talked about it in their magazines; meanwhile, Gould slept on the streets or in seedy hotels, hardly ate, dressed in the rags that his Greenwich Village poet or painter friends no longer wore.

And although it was common to see him drunk and imitating the flight of a seagull, his Oral History, which no one had seen yet, already enjoyed a certain prestige. Upon Gould's death in 1957, his friends began a long search for his famous manuscript in the corners of the Village that he frequented.

The surprising result of that expedition, which reveals the "secret" to which the title refers, is what Mitchell tells us in his second chronicle. On the rare occasions when journalism becomes great literature, we are not only dealing with a genius author; an enormous character is also needed "The Last Bohemian", as Gould was called, rescues the romantic ideal of the writer possessed by his work, devoted entirely to it and a unique setting, that of the hive of human energy that was the New York of the forties and fifties. "Joe Gould's Secret" is a book to enjoy line by line, not to lose detail and to continue deciphering its rich meaning long after reading is finished.

the bottom of the port

The view from the confluence between the Hudson and the East River is one of those few spaces that change at every glance. A place where arrivals of remote emigrants are still evoked in search of destinations finally picked up by guys like Mitchell, in the best of cases.

Of the various books in which they were compiled, this has always been considered the best and most representative of the Mitchell style. It brings together six pieces written in the 1940s and 1950s. They are independent texts but linked to each other, because in all of them the author wanders along the New York seafront and explores a city far removed from the tourist postcards. Mitchell describes the port areas, the Hudson River and the East River, the fish market, the now-defunct oyster farming facilities, an old cemetery on Staten Island, barges, barges, fishing boats and unique characters such as Sloppy Louie, the owner of a restaurant.

Portrait of the belly of the city and also of a world that is disappearing, of stories of the present and legends of the past, of eccentric types, The Bottom of the Harbor is a prodigious chronicle of New York and its inhabitants: first class journalism and great literature. 

the bottom of the port

McSorley's Fabulous Tavern

What happened in New York was in the hands of Mitchell what is now in the hands of Fran lebowitz. Doing journalism, social chronicle, satire or simply quotes for events in the big city ends up being a transcendent chronicle of the mundane, embellishing it from the miserable to the most admirable. Because miseries have their moments of glory, while the tinsel of the most resounding success ends up being quickly polished by the frenzy of the city in search of new fleeting myths.

Bearded women, gypsies, gourmets, waiters, Indian workers, bohemians, visionaries, fanatics, impostors and all kinds of lost souls circulate in this compilation of twenty-seven chronicles published in the section of the New Yorker dedicated to the profiles of the most exotic characters of the city.

All flesh and blood characters that make up an extraordinary fresco from the 30s and 40s, a golden age in which the great melting pot that was and still is New York City was forged.

McSorley's Fabulous Tavern
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