Adam Gopnik on Joseph Mitchell’s “Joe Gould’s Secret”

Joseph Mitchell was at once the most lucid and the most mysterious of the great mid-century New Yorker writers. Lucid in its clean, limpid minimalism, Mitchell’s prose was like a beautiful, clear river, its bottom not muddy but sparkling—sparkling with what might simply be gravel catching the light or, perhaps, diamonds worth diving for. Whichever it was, in each of his sentences there was always the mysterious sense of something more left unsaid.

- By Adam Gopnik

“Joe Gould is a jaunty and emaciated little man who has been a notable in the cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and dumps of Greenwich Village for a quarter of a century,” begins Mitchell’s Profile “Professor Sea Gull,” from 1942, the foundation for his masterpiece “Joe Gould’s Secret,” from 1964. The slightly winking sobriety of the inventory is made poetic by the eccentric pairing of adjectives: jaunty and emaciated, hungry but happy—two concepts in sharp but subtly pointed contradiction.

On the surface, Mitchell’s prose style derived from the economical newspaper writing he learned at the