‘I wish this guy hadn’t written this book’

Joseph Mitchell both described and conjured the dazzling world of New York when it was really New York — the characters, the grit, the language.

“Gould looked like a bum and lived like a bum,” Mitchell wrote. “He wore castoff clothes, and he slept in flophouses or in the cheapest rooms in cheap hotels. Sometimes he slept in doorways. He spent most of his time hanging out in diners and cafeterias and barrooms in the Village or wandering around the streets or looking up friends and acquaintan... See more