Joseph Mitchell
Author
Pub. Date
[2001]
Language
English
Description
New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Edmund Wilson's personal and informative study on the plight of the Native American Indians, Apologies to the Iroquois.
As Wilson writes, "[In August 1975] I discovered in the New York Times what seemed to me a very queer story. A band of Mohawk Indians, under the leadership of a chief called Standing Arrow, had moved in on some land on Schoharie Creek, a little river that flows into the Mohawk not far from Amsterdam, New York, and established a...
Pub. Date
[2000]
Language
English
Description
Joe Mitchell is a top writer at The New Yorker, specializing in profiles of urban eccentrics. But he's never met anyone as fascinating as Joe Gould, a cantankerous, unkempt, yet possibly brilliant street philosopher. When Mitchell decides to profile Gould, he has to decide whether Gould is a fraud or a genius.