Joe Gould's Secret (Modern Library) - Softcover

Mitchell, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679601848 ISBN 13: 9780679601845

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1996

Synopsis

Joseph Ferdinand Gould--better known as Joe Gould--was a member of one of the oldest families in Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, and his parents took it for granted that he would go on to medical school and become a surgeon and a distinguished civic leader, as many of his ancestors, including his father and grandfather, had been. Instead, in 1916, in his middle twenties, he abruptly broke with his background and came to New York City and spent the next forty years living from hand to mouth in Greenwich Village as a kind of half outcast, half bohemian hero. He panhandled in Village hangouts, wore cast-off clothes, slept in flophouses or doorways, and often went hungry for days at a time. He said that he lived this way so that he could wander around the city at will, listening to people, and writing down some of the astonishing things he heard them say. He had become obsessed with the idea that talk is history and that even offhand remarks may have an eerie and prophetic historical import. He wrote in
dime-store composition books, filling hundreds of them, and said that these books, when eventually joined together, would become an enormous book (a
(continued on back flap)

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Mitchell came to New York City in 1929 from a small farming town called Fairmont, in the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina. He was twenty-one years old. He worked as a reporter and feature writer--for The World, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York World-Telegram--for eight years, and then went to The New Yorker, where he worked off and on until his death in 1996.

Synopsis

A profile of the writer and Greenwich Village bohemian highlights his wealthy upbringing and Harvard education, his complicated lifestyle, and his fascination with oral history.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679601848
• ISBN 13: 9780679601845
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 186