The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell

From 1938 to 1964, Joseph Mitchell published unforgettable profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of New York City. His stories of Fulton Fish Market, Greenwich Village wanderer Joe Gould, McSorley’s Old Ale House, and a graveyard caretaker on the South Shore of Staten Island earned Mitchell the reputation of a writer’s writer. Then his byline vanished from print. For thirty-one years, the story goes, he went to his office almost every day, worked behind a closed door, and never submitted another piece.

Through a chance encounter with one of Mitchell’s closest friends and a meticulous examination of new and unpublished material, Scott Schomburg discovers another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he said, he worked as hard as he ever did. During this decades-long silence, Mitchell was engaged in a different form of writing: an obsessive collecting and note-taking that he hoped would preserve lives otherwise lost to time. It was a restless pursuit of the eternal in the everyday of a dying world.

Following in Mitchell’s footsteps from his childhood in the swamps of North Carolina to his last years in a rapidly changing New York, The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell is a revelation of new insight about a legendary writer and his work. Schomburg’s lucid and poignant narrative captures Mitchell’s unique blend of the apocalyptic and elegiac. It’s the kind of story Mitchell himself might have written.