Joseph Mitchell

(1908 - 1996)

Born on a farm in North Carolina, Joseph Mitchell moved to New York City in 1929 and started working for newspapers. The New Yorker hired him in 1938, and he worked at the magazine until his death—although he never published anything after his best-known work, Joe Gould’s Secret, came out in 1964. “Knowing him as a colleague during this profound and elegant silence” over those thirty-one years, Roger Angell later wrote, “made you feel like an archaeologist forever on the brink of an extraordinary find. He hadn’t stopped writing, that was always clear; he was busy on a piece that hadn’t gone right so far…Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.”