The grammar of hard facts

Made up in Manhattan

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker. By Thomas Kunkel. Random House; 366 pages; $30.

“AT ANY hour of the day or night,” wrote Joseph Mitchell, “I can shut my eyes and visualise in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets.” That, for Mitchell, was New York, where he worked as a reporter—starting in 1929, when he arrived as a college dropout from a small town in North Carolina, until 1964, when he submitted his last piece to the New Yorker.

Researching a story, Mitchell could spend whole days on the bus, taking notes on what he saw out of the window, or wandering around a cemetery to identify the weeds that grew there. Mitchell, wrote one critic, could “achieve the same effects with the grammar of hard facts that Dickens achieved with the rhetoric of imagination.” He came to be widely imitated. Calvin Trillin dedicated one of his books “to the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell.”

Meticulousness, however, had its price. Once a newspaperman filing many...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1cY1upM