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From 1964 until his death in 1996, Joseph Mitchell went to his office at The New Yorker almost every day and published nothing of significance. Before that silence he had written some of the most admired reporting in American magazines: on McSorley’s saloon in the East Village, the Fulton Fish Market, the oystermen and rivermen of New York harbour, and Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village eccentric who claimed to be writing the longest book in the world. Mitchell, born near Fairmont, North Carolina, came to New York in 1929, worked as a newspaper reporter through the 1930s and joined The New Yorker in 1938. In 1992 his four New Yorker collections were gathered in Up in the Old Hotel, which became a bestseller. This guide covers his six key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 key books · 1938–1992 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Joseph Mitchell published six books: My Ears Are Bent (1938), McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1959), Joe Gould’s Secret (1965), his best-known book, and the omnibus Up in the Old Hotel (1992). Start with Up in the Old Hotel, which contains the four middle books in one volume. Below is what each one covers, and the story behind Mr. Flood.
Where to Start with Joseph Mitchell
If you want almost everything in one volume
→ Up in the Old Hotel (1992) — the four New Yorker collections plus uncollected pieces.
If you want his most famous story
→ Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) — a Village eccentric and a book that may not exist.
If you want the New York waterfront
→ The Bottom of the Harbor (1959) — six pieces on the harbour and the people who worked it.
If you want the young newspaperman
→ My Ears Are Bent (1938) — his 1930s reporting for the city papers.
6 Joseph Mitchell Books, in Order
My Ears Are Bent
His first book, gathering the features he wrote in the 1930s, mostly for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York World-Telegram. The subjects are Harlem gin mills, burlesque houses, revival halls, street evangelists, exotic dancers and a woman boxer, grouped under headings such as “Drunks” and “Come to Jesus”. It was published the year he joined The New Yorker.
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
His first New Yorker collection, named after his piece on McSorley’s, the ale house at 15 East Seventh Street that opened in 1854. It includes profiles of Lady Olga, a bearded circus performer; Commodore Dutch, who held an annual ball in his own honour; a gypsy king; and “Professor Sea Gull”, his first profile of Joe Gould, from December 1942.
Old Mr. Flood
Three linked pieces, first published in The New Yorker in 1944 and 1945, about Hugh G. Flood, a ninety-three-year-old who spends his days around the Fulton Fish Market and means to live to 115 by eating almost nothing but fish and shellfish. In an author’s note Mitchell explained that Mr. Flood was not one man but a combination of several old men from the market.
The Bottom of the Harbor
Six long pieces about the waters around New York and the people who worked them, including the title piece, “Up in the Old Hotel” and “Mr. Hunter’s Grave”, a portrait of an old man built largely from his own talk. Janet Malcolm called it his most ambitious book about the city.
Joe Gould’s Secret
Mitchell’s 1942 profile of Joe Gould, a penniless Greenwich Village figure who said he was writing an “Oral History of Our Time” millions of words long, paired with the two-part sequel he published in 1964, after Gould’s death. The sequel reveals that Mitchell came to believe the history did not exist and that Gould kept rewriting a few chapters about his own life. It was his last book, and was filmed in 2000 by Stanley Tucci.
Up in the Old Hotel
A 718-page volume from Pantheon that reprints McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor and Joe Gould’s Secret, adds seven previously uncollected pieces, among them his writing on the Mohawk ironworkers of New York, and opens with a new author’s note. Published with little fanfare in August 1992, it became a bestseller and brought him a new generation of readers four years before his death.
In What Order to Read Joseph Mitchell
None of the books depends on another, but reading them in order shows a change. The newspaper pieces of the 1930s are quick and comic; the New Yorker work grows slower and longer, and by The Bottom of the Harbor it is preoccupied with old people, old buildings and death. Joe Gould’s Secret closes the circle by returning to a subject he had first written about in 1942.
In practice, most readers start and finish with Up in the Old Hotel, since it contains four of the six books. Read Joe Gould’s Secret in its two parts in the order they were written, so that the 1964 revelation lands as Mitchell intended. Only My Ears Are Bent sits outside the omnibus.
A reading path
1. McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943)
2. Old Mr. Flood (1948)
3. The Bottom of the Harbor (1959)
4. Joe Gould’s Secret (1965)
5. My Ears Are Bent (1938)
Related Books by and about Joseph Mitchell
Beyond the 6 key books: 3 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Contributions and books about Mitchell
3
3 books · 1960–2016
- 1960Apologies to the IroquoisEdmund Wilson’s book, with Mitchell’s “The Mohawks in High Steel”
- 2015Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorkerthe biography by Thomas Kunkel
- 2016Joe Gould’s TeethJill Lepore’s search for Gould’s lost Oral History
The years · 1908–1996
Quick facts about Joseph Mitchell
- Known for
- Long, patient portraits of New York’s overlooked people and places for The New Yorker, and the three decades of silence that followed them.
- 1908
- Born near Fairmont, North Carolina
- 1938
- Joins The New Yorker
- 1996
- Dies in Manhattan, aged 87
- Born
- 27 July 1908, on his grandparents’ farm near Fairmont, North Carolina
- Education
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1925–1929, no degree
- Newspapers
- The World, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York World-Telegram
- The New Yorker
- Staff writer from 1938 until his death
- Married
- The reporter and photographer Therese Jacobsen, in 1932; two daughters
- Civic work
- Co-founder of the South Street Seaport Museum; five years on the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission
- Died
- 24 May 1996, Manhattan, New York City
The red mark is 1965: Joe Gould’s Secret, his last book.
How Joseph Mitchell Writes: Letting People Talk
Mitchell’s subjects were people other reporters ignored: a bearded lady, a saloon keeper, fishmongers, a Mohawk ironworker, a Staten Island churchman. He spent weeks or months with them and let them talk at length; many of his pieces are carried by long monologues in the subject’s own voice, framed by plain, precise description of a place.
His sentences are long and level, built from lists of concrete things: the stock of a saloon, the fish on a stall, the names on gravestones. He had a strong taste for cemeteries, ruins and old age, and in the author’s note to Up in the Old Hotel he described graveyard humour as typical of his cast of mind.
Not everything in the New Yorker pieces is literal reporting. Mr. Flood is a composite, the gypsy king Cockeye Johnny Nikanov was invented, and some scenes were rearranged. Mitchell acknowledged the Flood composite in print in 1948; the rest came out in Thomas Kunkel’s 2015 biography. Opinion on how much this matters is divided; John McPhee’s answer was “The writing is the writing.”
Watch
Roger Angell and David Remnick remember Joseph Mitchell
No filmed interview with Mitchell himself is available, so this is the next best thing: two of his New Yorker colleagues, Roger Angell and David Remnick, talk to Charlie Rose about him after his death in 1996.
Frequently asked questions about Joseph Mitchell’s books
How many books has Joseph Mitchell written?
Six. Five appeared between 1938 and 1965: My Ears Are Bent, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor and Joe Gould’s Secret. The sixth, Up in the Old Hotel (1992), collects four of them with seven previously uncollected pieces.
What are Joseph Mitchell’s books in order?
My Ears Are Bent (1938), McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1959), Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) and Up in the Old Hotel (1992).
Where should I start with Joseph Mitchell?
With Up in the Old Hotel, which contains McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor and Joe Gould’s Secret. If you want a single short book first, read Joe Gould’s Secret.
What is Joseph Mitchell’s most famous book?
Joe Gould’s Secret (1965), his two profiles of the Greenwich Village eccentric Joe Gould, written in 1942 and 1964. It was his last book and the basis of the 2000 film.
Was Mr. Flood a real person?
No. In the author’s note to Old Mr. Flood (1948) Mitchell wrote that Mr. Flood was not one man but combined aspects of several old men from the Fulton Fish Market. Thomas Kunkel’s biography Man in Profile (2015) showed that he went further elsewhere: the gypsy king Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, profiled in 1942, did not exist, and the opening scene of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” was rearranged. Some writers, including Ian Frazier and David Remnick, defended him as working to the standards of his time; others, such as Michael Rosenwald in the Columbia Journalism Review, argued he knew he was crossing a line.
Is there a film of Joe Gould’s Secret?
Yes. Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) was directed by Stanley Tucci, who also plays Mitchell, from a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, with Ian Holm as Gould and Hope Davis as Mitchell’s wife. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000.
Did Joe Gould’s Oral History really exist?
Mitchell concluded in 1964 that it did not, and that Gould had only rewritten a few chapters about his own life. The historian Jill Lepore, in Joe Gould’s Teeth (2016), did not find the manuscript but found evidence that parts of it existed, including a fragment.
Why did Joseph Mitchell stop writing?
No one knows for certain. After Joe Gould’s Secret in 1964 he published almost nothing for the rest of his life, though he kept going to his New Yorker office. His biographer Thomas Kunkel links the silence to perfectionism and to a mind increasingly turned towards the past. Previously unpublished pieces appeared in The New Yorker in 2013 and 2015.
Is there a biography of Joseph Mitchell?
Yes: Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel (Random House, 2015), drawing on his papers, including his reporting notes. Janet Malcolm reviewed it in The New York Review of Books.
When did Joseph Mitchell die?
On 24 May 1996, of cancer, in Manhattan, at the age of 87. He was born on 27 July 1908 near Fairmont, North Carolina.
Footnotes
- Joseph Mitchell (writer) — Wikipedia
- Joe Gould’s Secret (film) — Wikipedia
- Joseph Mitchell: Master Writer of the City — Janet Malcolm, The New York Review of Books, 2015
- ‘I wish this guy hadn’t written this book’ — Columbia Journalism Review, 2015
- Fish-eating, whiskey, death & rebirth — The New Criterion, 1992
- Joe Gould’s Teeth review — NPR, 2016
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Graveyard humor is an exemplification of the way I look at the world. It typifies my cast of mind.”
— Joseph Mitchell, author’s note to Up in the Old Hotel (1992)
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