Creative Nonfiction Course Guide (Lisa Heise)

Mitchell's pieces, often quite long, chronicled quotidian life in New York, with an emphasis on eccentrics and marginal figures, including gypsies, circus freaks, a street preacher, the Union League of the Deaf, Mohawk steelworkers, and a nine-year-old mixed-race musical prodigy. M. combined exhaustively observed physical detail with particular attention to patterns of speech—his profiles are often largely in dialogue-to raise reportage to verbal art. In this, he anticipated the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike many New Journalists, however, M. never used his reportage to strike attitudes. His subjects are allowed to speak for themselves without condescension. | from Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature | Credo Reference (Library Database)

Among his peers at The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell was the most admired writer of fact in the magazine's history. The articles he turned in from 1937 to 1964 were not numerous but they managed to give sharp, clear pictures of whole worlds now largely passed from the scene: the old Bowery, the New York harbor life of tugboats and shad fishermen, the Fulton Fish Market, and the old neighborhoods and graveyards of Brooklyn and Staten Island. They contained indelible portraits of Irish bar flies, lowlifes and prostitutes, Scandinavian sea captains and Italian fishmongers, and a gypsy subculture residing in Manhattan--people he defied any reader to denigrate by identifying them as "little people"--"They're as big as you are, whoever you are," he admonished. | From: Southwest Review(Vol. 93, Issue 4),, Fall 2008 | Gale Literature Resource (Library Database)

Originally published April 21, 1944. In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. During a war, the rat populations of seaports and of ships always shoot up. House rats left their nests in basements and began to dig burrows in vacant lots and parks, particularly Central Park. | New Yorker. 9/4/2023, Vol. 99 Issue 27, p20-26.| Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 into a prosperous family of North Carolina cotton and tobacco growers. At the age of twenty-one, he came to New York City to pursue a career as a writer, and he started contributing to this magazine four years later. In the late sixties and the early seventies, he began writing a memoir. What follows was intended to be the third chapter but was never finished. | Republished The New Yorker(Vol. 91, Issue 1) Feb. 16, 2015 | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)