Joseph Mitchell – författare

"The most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender." So wrote Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker journalist and chronicler of the full spectrum of humanity in New York City from the 1930s to the '60s, when his last columns were published. The critic Malcolm Cowley called Mitchell "the best reporter in the country," while Stanley Edgar Hyman would later write that he was "a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter, a humorist only in the sense that Faulkner is a humorist." But, before he found fame, Mitchell worked as a beat reporter with an unusually keen sense of style and uncommonly graceful prose at the now-defunct World-Telegram. There, he wrote a series of articles on the anthropologist Franz Boas, who influenced his trenchant observations of humanity.Man with Variations republishes Mitchell's writings on Boas, which weave together interviews with the great anthropologist and his students and colleagues to recount a formative period in American anthropology, as well as the journalist's own compelling set of reflections on the human condition.Man with Variations will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the discipline, and it will also be welcomed by the new generation of readers who are discovering Mitchell's work.

‘It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer’ Nicci French, IndependentIt was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History – the longest book ever written he claimed, formed of recorded conversations set down in exercise books. Of course, when Gould died the great epic was nowhere to be found.This compelling portrait of a true New York eccentric, a man who embodied the disconnected, delusional nature of real life, was Mitchell’s personal enquiry into the agony of writer’s block.Joe Gould's Secret can be found in the longer collection of Mitchell's writing Up in the Old Hotel.