“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

His Own Sweet Time: Joseph Mitchell’s Omnibus 20 Years On, Part II

(Editor’s note: This is the second and concluding installment of Matthew Fleagle’s remembrance of author and New Yorker magazine writer Joseph Mitchell. Part I can be found here.)


Joseph Mitchell and his elder daughter, Nora, in the 1940s. (Photograph by Therese Jacobsen Mitchell, used courtesy of Elizabeth Mitchell and Nora Mitchell Sanborn.)

Joseph Mitchell’s writing evolved over the course

His Own Sweet Time: Joseph Mitchell’s Omnibus 20 Years On, Part I

(Editor’s note: This is the opening installment of a two-part feature looking back at the career of Joseph Mitchell, a renowned staff writer for The New Yorker, two decades after the release of his last collection of essays. The author of this piece is Matthew Fleagle, a technical writer at a small software company in Seattle, Washington. In a previous life, Fleagle contributed frequently to