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Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (Pantheon, 1992) Upon publication of Up in the Old Hotel, the book's venerable old author, Joseph Mitchell, was raised from the dustbin of America's literary imagination for a final hurrah. Not many people remembered him. He hadn't published a single thing in a quarter century. But over the course of his nearly 30-year career with the New Yorker, in which he specialized in wry, pithy tales of marginalized New York eccentrics (especially bar owners, preachers, and fishermen), Mitchell earned a reputation for wizardry; indeed, he employed a voice that following generations of New Yorker writers appropriated, made anew. Mitchell is that magazine's patriarch. Even today they are inseparable. The 37 pieces in this collection reflect Mitchell's graceful ear. Rarely does he let his own prose do the talking. His characters tell their own sad, contradictory, sympathetic stories; and, more often than not, they dig their own graves. Roy Blount Jr. writes in The Atlantic, "If I could play around with time, I would make myself alive and literate on that week in 1940 when I could flip suspensefully through the latest New Yorker (whose table of contents in those days was minimal), come across a piece titled "Lady Olga," savor its first sentence ("Jane Barnell occasionally considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living"), scan its first paragraph, jump ahead a number of pages to the byline, and exclaim: 'Oh, glory. Joseph Mitchell has profiled a bearded lady.'" (August, 1992, Page 97) MORE: Brief bio and bibliography on North Carolina writer’s network Smithsonian Magazine review of Mitchell’s early newspaper work New York Review of Books essay on Mitchell’s life and work |
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