MANHATTAN PROJECT

From The Independent archive: Nicci French on Joseph Mitchell’s eerie masterpiece of profile writing – ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’ – about a solitary nocturnal wanderer who worked for years on an epic book that might never have even existed

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Joseph Mitchell isn’t much talked of nowadays but, even in a group that included Truman Capote, John Hersey and Rachel Carson, he was probably the greatest non-fiction writer in The New Yorker’s history. He had been born in the Deep South but virtually his whole professional career was spent in New York City, with a matchless gift for listening to gangsters and cops, prize-fighters and longshoremen, barmen and Gypsies.

In 1932 Mitchell got to know Joe Gould, who was a Greenwich Village legend, a vagrant, a talker, a writer; some said a genius. He was constantly working on an epic book called An Oral History of our Time. Mitchell himself was an obsessive reader of