Scott Schomburg: The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

A revelatory biography of the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell that focuses on his infamous three-decade-long writer's block and sheds light on the private productivity of those years.

From 1938 to 1964, Joseph Mitchell published unforgettable profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker , portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of New York City. His stories of Fulton Fish Market, Greenwich Village wanderer Joe Gould, McSorley's Old Ale House, and a graveyard caretaker on the South Shore of Staten Island earned Mitchell the reputation of a writer's writer. Then his byline vanished from print. For thirty-one years, the story goes, he went to his office almost every day, worked behind a closed door, and never submitted another piece.

Through a chance encounter with one of Mitchell's closest friends and a meticulous examination of new and unpublished material, Scott Schomburg discovers another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he said, he worked as hard as he ever did. During this decades-long silence, Mitchell was engaged in a different form of writing: an obsessive collecting and note-taking that he hoped would preserve lives otherwise lost to time. It was a restless pursuit of the eternal in the everyday of a dying world.

Following in Mitchell's footsteps from his childhood in the swamps of North Carolina to his last years in a rapidly changing New York, The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell is a revelation of new insight about a legendary writer and his work. Schomburg's lucid and poignant narrative captures Mitchell's unique blend of the apocalyptic and elegiac. It's the kind of story Mitchell himself might have written.