“New York’s First True Biographer”

Last August, we posted on this page Matthew Fleagle’s wonderful two-part remembrance of Joseph Mitchell (here and here), the legendary and once prolific New Yorker writer who stopped publishing anything in 1964, yet maintained regular hours in the magazine’s Midtown offices for the next three decades.

Then, just last week, The New Yorker finally brought readers “Street
Life,” the first of three