{"product_id":"the-lost-years-of-joseph-mitchell","title":"The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrom 1938 to 1964, Joseph Mitchell published unforgettable profiles as a staff writer at \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThrough a chance encounter with one of Mitchell’s closest friends and a meticulous examination of new and unpublished material, Scott Schomburg discovers another Mitchell, one who would leave his desk to visit an old cemetery or enter a demolition site, where, he said, he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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFollowing in Mitchell’s footsteps from his childhood in the swamps of North Carolina to his last years in a rapidly changing New York, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 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.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":55621116395688,"sku":"9798896230953","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0726\/9203\/files\/schomburg-final-hi-res.jpg?v=1781625538","url":"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/products\/the-lost-years-of-joseph-mitchell","provider":"New York Review Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}