{"id":2935,"date":"2012-02-27T14:47:49","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T14:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/?p=2935"},"modified":"2022-07-01T21:24:43","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T21:24:43","slug":"mitchell-joseph-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/m\/mitchell-joseph-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mitchell, Joseph"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mitchell\"<\/a>by Eleanore MacLean <\/em>(2014)<\/p>\n

MITCHELL, JOSEPH (1908-1996). Joseph Mitchell grew up in Fairmont, North Carolina, a farming town in the state\u2019s coastal plains. In 1929 Mitchell moved to New York City and began his career working as a crime reporter and feature writer for The World<\/em>, The Herald Tribune<\/em>, and The World Telegram<\/em>. In 1931 he signed on as a deck boy for the Hog Island freighter The City of Fairbury<\/em>, bringing pulp logs to New York City from Leningrad. After his return Mitchell continued to work as a journalist until 1938, when Harold Ross hired him to write for The New Yorker<\/em>. Mitchell stayed at The New Yorker<\/em> until his death in 1996, though \u201cJoe Gould\u2019s Secret\u201d (1964) was his last published piece . Mitchell\u2019s case of writer\u2019s block is one of the more famous and puzzling ones. He continued to come in to his office at The New Yorker<\/em>, and his daughter remembers that \u201cHe had oceans of paper in many file cabinets, at home and at the office,\u201d yet Mitchell never published again. In his eighties, Mitchell admitted that \u201cThe hideous state the world is in just defeats the kind of writing I used to do.\u201d During these years he spent more time in South Carolina and became involved in reforestation projects. Mitchell also maintained membership in several societies dedicated to preserving history and the arts, including serving from 1972 to 1980 as a founding board and Restoration Committee member of the South Street Seaport Museum.<\/p>\n

My Ears Are Bent<\/em> (1938) is a collection of Mitchell\u2019s early newspaper features. While reporting brought him in contact with celebrities like Albert Einstein, Bing Crosby, and George Bernard Shaw, the inhabitants of the forgotten corners of Harlem, The Bowery, Greenwich Village, and New York Harbor that Mitchell encountered working the night shift interested him more. Several pieces in My Ears Are Bent<\/em> foreshadow later New Yorker profiles. Echoes of \u201cSaltwater Farmers\u201d can be found in \u201cDragger Captain\u201d and \u201cThe Rivermen,\u201d both of which appear in the collection The Bottom of the Harbor<\/em> (1960).<\/p>\n

Mitchell published four collections of stories originally printed in The New Yorker<\/em>: McSorley\u2019s Wonderful Saloon<\/em> (1943), Old Mr. Flood<\/em> (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor<\/em>, and Joe Gould\u2019s Secret<\/em> (1965). Up in the Old Hotel<\/em> (1992) is an omnibus collection of the four earlier volumes, with some additional stories included. McSorley\u2019s Wonderful Saloon<\/em> chronicles New York\u2019s drunks, gypsies, street preachers, and steel workers, among others. Like Mark Twain, Mitchell employs dark humor and blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction. David Remnick, a later editor of The New Yorker<\/em>, described McSorley\u2019s Wonderful Saloon<\/em> in his 2008 introduction to Up In the Old Hotel<\/em> as the Dubliners<\/em> of New York City. Mitchell included one waterfront story, \u201cA Mess of Clams,\u201d in McSorley\u2019s Wonderful Saloon<\/em>. Old Mr. Flood<\/em>, which Mitchell described in the author\u2019s note as a series of \u201ctruthful rather than factual\u201d stories, is Mitchell\u2019s first focused examination of life on the waterfront. He created the Mr. Flood character from a composite of several real men involved in the Fulton Fish Market.<\/p>\n

Mitchell wrote the stories in The Bottom of the Harbor<\/em>, his influential collection of sea stories, between 1944 and 1959 with the nostalgic understanding that these people and places with traditional maritime skills and sensibilities would soon disappear. Like John Steinbeck\u2019s examination of the Monterey waterfront community in Cannery Row<\/em> (1945), Mitchell uses individual characters to reflect on cultural changes. The result is a record of the New York waterfront\u2019s decline in economic and cultural prominence. Like much of Mitchell\u2019s work, the pieces in Bottom of the Harbor<\/em> are also stories about storytelling. In particular, \u201cDragger Captain\u201d is a masterful portrait of Captain Ellery Thompson of Stonington, Connecticut, as well as a carefully crafted meta-story. The success of \u201cDragger Captain\u201d led to Thompson\u2019s publishing two books of his own entitled Draggerman\u2019s Haul: The Personal Story of a Connecticut Fishing Captain<\/em> (1950) and Come Aboard the Draggers: Sea Sketches<\/em> (1958). Mitchell\u2019s interest in architecture drives \u201cUp in the Old Hotel\u201d, a quasi-ghost story about Louis Morino, proprietor of Sloppy Louie\u2019s, and the building Morino owns. \u201cThe Bottom of the Harbor\u201d begins with a topographical tour of New York Harbor\u2019s filthy but teeming waters before Mitchell turns to a natural history of the marine life and fishermen tied to it. Roy, a \u201charbor nut,\u201d delivers the line: \u201cI don\u2019t even worry about the pollution any more. My only hope, I hope they don\u2019t pollute the harbor with something a million times worse than pollution.\u201d Mitchell also presents the ways in which the sea influences communities, tracing the history of the rats that infest New York\u2019s streets in \u201cThe Rats on the Waterfront\u201d and examining the spiritual attachment the sea creates between a true riverman and the water in \u201cThe Rivermen.\u201d While Mitchell has an affinity for the waterfront, it also seems to overwhelm him with all-too-clear signs that this maritime culture is slipping away. In \u201cMr. Hunter\u2019s Grave,\u201d Mitchell escapes to the waterfront\u2019s roots and Mr. Hunter\u2019s stories. He opens with the line, \u201cWhen things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Mitchell\u2019s final publication, the lengthy profile of Joe Gould titled \u201cJoe Gould\u2019s Secret,\u201d Mitchell develops the understated qualities in his previous stories. While not a particularly maritime story, \u201cJoe Gould\u2019s Secret\u201d is perhaps the best representation of both Mitchell\u2019s craft as a writer and his perceptive and respectful treatment of his subjects.<\/p>\n

Even before his arrival at The New Yorker<\/em>, Mitchell was such a popular reporter that his picture appeared on newspaper delivery trucks. The New Yorker<\/em> heralded Mitchell as a standard-setter during his tenure there, and he is still admired for his exceptional talents as a listener and observer. His subjects\u2019 words make up long sections of each piece, and Mitchell paces their vignettes with a natural storyteller\u2019s attention to timing and detail. The pieces can be read as metafictional considerations of transience and change, yet are also filled with what Mitchell described as graveyard humor. Mitchell deftly guides his reader\u2019s curiosity through his own to create poignant and sharp explorations of daily life in New York City and the waterfront.<\/p>\n

My Ears Are Bent<\/em> (1938)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a>
\nGoogle Book Search<\/a><\/p>\n

The Bottom of the Harbor<\/em> (1960)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a>
\nGoogle Book Search<\/a><\/p>\n

Old Mr. Flood<\/em> (1948)<\/p>\n

Google Book Search<\/a><\/p>\n

McSorley\u2019s Wonderful Saloon <\/em>(1943)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Further Studies:<\/em><\/p>\n

Adams, Tim. \u201cJoseph Mitchell: mysterious chronicler of the margins of New York.\u201d<\/a> The Guardian. 30 June 2012.<\/p>\n

“Joe Gould\u2019s Secret<\/em> (2000).” IMDb.com, Inc.,<\/em> https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0172632\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Special Issue No. 26: Joseph Mitchell.”<\/a> Pembroke Magazine, <\/em>1994.<\/p>\n

Rundus, Raymond J. \u201cJoseph Mitchell Reconsidered.\u201d<\/a> The Sewanee Review.<\/em> Vol. 113, No. 1, 2005, pp. 62-83.<\/p>\n

Severo, Richard. \u201cJoseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and Unconventional, Dies at 87.\u201d<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>. 25 May 1996.<\/p>\n

Singer, Mark. \u201cJoe Mitchell\u2019s Secret.\u201d The New Yorker.<\/em> 22 Feb. 1999.<\/p>\n

keywords: white, male<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Eleanore MacLean (2014) MITCHELL, JOSEPH (1908-1996). Joseph Mitchell grew up in Fairmont, North Carolina, a farming town in the state\u2019s coastal plains. In 1929 Mitchell moved to New York City and began his career working as a crime reporter and Continue reading &<\/span> text links<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":498,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25926],"tags":[53756,53761,53775,53763,53764,53784,34916],"class_list":["post-2935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-m","tag-20th-century","tag-fiction","tag-fishing","tag-multimedia-multimodal","tag-nonfiction","tag-short-story","tag-video"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/498"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2935"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6501,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935\/revisions\/6501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}