Mitchell, Joseph Quincy

(b. 27 July 1908 near Iona, North Carolina; d. 24 May 1996 in New York City), literary journalist who brought dignity and poetry to the lives of the eccentric and obscure people he wrote about.

Mitchell, one of three children of Averette Nance Mitchell, a cotton and tobacco farmer and trader, and Elizabeth Amanda Parker, a homemaker, grew up in Fairmont, a small town in southeastern North Carolina, and attended Fairmont High School. From 1925 to 1929 he studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he developed an interest in literature and the goal of becoming a writer. In 1929 he submitted an article about tobacco to the New York Herald Tribune, which published it. Inspired, he left school and moved to New York City; he arrived four days before the stock market crash. He got a job as a reporter for the New York World, moved to the New York Herald Tribune in 1930, and landed at the New York World-Telegram in 1931. On 27 February 1931 he married Therese Dagny Engelsted Jacobsen, who died in 1980. They had two children.

Although he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial and other major stories, Mitchell’s regular beat was human-interest features rather than hard news. He quickly became known for his ability to capture the rhythms of his subjects’ speech, a gift recognized in the title of a 1938 collection of his articles, My Ears Are Bent. Reviewing the book in the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman wrote, “I guess he must be about the best interviewer in the world, though on the surface it seems he does nothing but let people talk.”

Mitchell, a gracious man who habitually dressed in dark Brooks Brothers suits, began contributing to the New Yorker in 1933, with an article about Elkton, Maryland, where more marriages were performed than in any other city in the country. He joined the weekly’s staff in 1938 and embarked on a series of articles about (as Mitchell later described his subjects) “visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the-end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.” Most of these early pieces were collected in the book McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943). The somewhat ironic title referred to Mitchell’s article about a New York City barroom where, in winter, the elderly regulars “grab the chairs nearest the stove and sit in them, as motionless as barnacles, until around six, when they yawn, stretch, and start for the door, insulated with ale against the dreadful loneliness of the old and alone.”

Along with his good friend A. J. Liebling and other New Yorker colleagues, Mitchell, an ardent admirer of James Joyce and other modernist writers, viewed journalism as a branch of literature, no less prone to artistry because it happened to be true. His articles displayed deftly drawn characters, a rich and subtle prose, and often a penetrating psychological symbolism. Reviewing one of his later books, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote that Mitchell “is a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter.”

In 1944 Mitchell published a New Yorker profile of a ninety-three-year-old retired house-wrecking contractor named Hugh G. Flood, and followed it with two more articles. When the pieces were collected in Old Mr, Flood(1948), Mitchell wrote in an author’s note, “Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did so in the past.” Mr. Flood represented the only time Mitchell indulged in a “composite” character. Indeed, all his subsequent writing was strictly factual.

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Mitchell’s articles grew longer and more intricate, and tended to focus less on eccentric personalities than on the natural and man-made landscapes of New York City and its environs. (Long before the phrases gained currency, he was interested in and wrote about ecology and historic preservation.) These pieces were collected in The Bottom of the Harbor (1959).

As the shape of his writing changed, Mitchell took more and more time to produce each piece. He worked five years on “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a long profile that was published in the New Yorker in 1964 and as a book of the same title the following year. Gould, “an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years,” had been one of Mitchell’s profile subjects in the 1940s. He was a Greenwich Village eccentric whose fame was based on his claim that he had written the longest unpublished literary work in existence, a document he called “An Oral History of Our Time.” Mitchell’s earlier portrait essentially took Gould at face value, but as its title suggests, “Joe Gould’s Secret” probed more deeply. In Mitchell’s characteristically indirect way, it confronted such issues as the mutual dependency between authors and their subjects and the intricacies of self-deception.

More than two decades passed after “Joe Gould’s Secret,” and still Mitchell did not produce another piece of writing. Long gaps between his publications were now assumed and Mitchell, a courtly and reticent man, occasionally made vague references to ongoing projects, so it took his editors and readers a long time to realize that there would be no more articles. While Mitchell never publicly announced his retirement, he seemed to tacitly acknowledge it when he allowed the publication in 1992 of Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of virtually all his New Yorker pieces. (At that time all his previous books were out of print.) The book was a critical and commercial success, and served to introduce Mitchell’s work to at least two generations of new and appreciative readers. His awards included the North Carolina medal for literature in 1984 and the Brendan Gill Prize of the Municipal Art Society in 1993.

Mitchell died of cancer at the age of eighty-seven in New York City. He was buried in the family plot in North Carolina.

While sometimes named as a forerunner to the New Journalism of the 1960s, Mitchell’s work was too idiosyncratic, too self-effacing, and probably too subtle to be a direct influence on many. However, thanks to the continued availability and popularity of Up in the Old Hotel, he continues to provide an example of a writer who magnificently distilled the literature of fact.

There is no biography or full-length critical study of Mitchell. Information about him can be found in Norman Sims, ed., Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (1990); Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker (1995); and Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000). Mitchell gave interviews to all three authors. Illuminating articles include Noel Perrin, “Paragon of Reporters: Joseph Mitchell,” Sewanee Review 91, no. 2 (1983): 167–184; William Zinsser, “Journeys with Joseph Mitchell,” American Scholar 62, no. 1 (1993): 132–138; and Mark Singer, “Joe Mitchell’s Secret,” New Yorker (22 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1999). The New Yorker published a memorial to Mitchell (10 June 1996). An obituary is in the New York Times (25 May 1996).

Ben Yagoda