August 25, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series immensely. In this week’s installment, Adam Gopnik revisits Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (September 19 and 24, 1964). He writes,

On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the New York World. But his real heroes were the Joyce of “Dubliners” and the great Russian stylists—Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov. 

This is perceptive. In his best pieces – “Joe Gould’s Secret,” “Up in the Old Hotel,” “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” “The Rivermen” – Mitchell’s approach is Joycean. He seeks not just meaning; he seeks epiphany.

Reading Gopnik’s absorbing piece, I recalled three other wonderful appreciations of Mitchell’s work: William Maxwell’s Introduction to the 1999 Vintage paperback Joe Gould’s Secret; Mark Singer’s “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” (The New Yorker, February 22 & March 1, 1999; included in his 2005 collection Character Studies); and Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City” (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015; included in her 2019 collection Nobody’s Looking).

Mitchell, in his superb “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” wrote one of my favorite opening sentences: “When 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.”

Joseph Mitchell is one of The New Yorker’s greatest writers. A shout-out to Adam Gopnik for honoring him in “Takes.”