Product Description

In the fall of 1929 a young man from a small farming town in the swamp country of North Carolina arrived in New York City. Because of a preternatural inaptitude for mathematics, he had failed to receive a college degree from the University of North Carolina and suffered the added misfortune of arriving in the big city at the moment of the stock market crash. For the next eight years, except for a brief period when he got sick of the whole business and went to sea on a freighter to Leningrad, Joseph Mitchell worked first at The World, then as a district man at The Herald Tribune, and then as a reporter and feature writer at The World-Telegram. He covered the criminal courts, Tammany Hall politicians, major murder trials, and the Lindbergh kidnapping. He wrote multi-part profiles of notable figures of the day, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, and Franz Boas. His byline, appearing two or three times a day in The World-Telegram, would become familiar to almost four hundred thousand readers. But Mitchell discovered that it was not the politicians, business leaders, or noted celebrities of the day that he got the most pleasure out of interviewing, but people whose talk was “artless, the talk of the people trying to reassure or comfort themselves . . . talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.” He began to frequent gymnasiums, speakeasies, and burlesque houses. He visited storefront churches in Harlem, covered the waterfront, and spent time at the Fulton Fish Market. Fascinated by the bizarre and the strange, he would become, in the words of Stanley Walker, his noted editor at The Herald Tribune, “one of the best newspaper reporters in the city.” In January 1938, My Ears Are Bent, a collection of Mitchell’s newspaper pieces, was published. That book, unavailable for more than sixty years, is now restored to print. A few months after the book’s original publication, Mitchell joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he remained until his death in 1996.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1712019 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-05
• Released on: 2001-06-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.53" h x 1.02" w x 4.66" l, .75 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"I don't think anything could be as much fun as to get a good hold on a pompous person and shake him or her until you can hear the false teeth rattling," says New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno to journalist Mitchell in a World-Telegram profile from the 1930s, but the sentiment could be applied to Mitchell himself. With the ability to turn bluntness to beauty, sarcasm to sincerity and plain speech to poetry, Mitchell who worked at the World-Telegram from 1930 to 1938 and spent the rest of his career at the New Yorker was a reporter and literary artist par excellence, interested in nearly everyone and everything. His profile of a stripper who begins naked and puts on her clothes is as fascinating as his sketch of George Bernard Shaw. Similarly, he is as empathetic toward Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan (the speakeasy queen usually called "Texas") as he is to the plight of Anne Morrow Lindbergh testifying at the kidnapping trial of her infant son. These 37 pieces and profiles most from the 1938 edition of this book, but with some new material added are breathtaking in their simplicity and honesty. Written at a time when newspapers tried to be as sensational as possible without appearing vulgar "belly" would be changed to "tummy" and "raped" became "criminally attacked" Mitchell made New York City shockingly vibrant and colorful without cheapening his subjects. He also evinced an empathy for African-Americans that's startling for the period (and the genre). In all, his liberating and refreshing honesty makes these pieces as vivacious, original and important as they were 65 years ago. (June) Forecast: The Stanley Tucci movie Joe Gould's Secret (1999), based on Mitchell's New Yorker piece and book by that title, has helped revive Mitchell's reputation and may be a useful hand-selling tool for this collection, which should sell in respectable numbers in the northeast and in literary outposts. Also in June, Pantheon will bring out the Mitchell collection McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, with a foreword by Calvin Trillin. ($25 384p ISBN 0-375-42102-5.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Mitchell was a cherished columnist for the now-defunct New York World-Telegram in the 1930s. He wrote primarily about the variety of street characters who seemed to be abundant in the great metropolis, and his columns read like Weegee photos transformed into words. These two volumes collect dozens of those portraits: My Ears Are Bent covers a variety of subjects, while McSorley's, which features a new foreword by Calvin Trillin, is a gallery of the customers at the famous Bowery watering hole. Great pieces of Americana.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
From the original reviews of
My Ears Are Bent

“Every Joseph Mitchell story I have ever read has been—in its own way—a work of art, a fact of which the author is doubtless perfectly unaware. . . . My Ears Are Bent is the saga of sideshow New York written by the angel of the odd or the imp of the perverse, as you prefer.”
—Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker

“[In My Ears Are Bent] Mitchell covers several dozen new angles in the life of metropolitan New York, from freak
to human interest, from behind the lines on headline sensations to strippers, reefer smokers, the life of a bar and grill. In doing it he has a perfect talent for hitting off the human equation.”
—Otis Ferguson, The New Republic

“These stories, the tales of the people he has talked to in the course of his wanderings about New York, are done with a sharp eye for the revealing detail, and in a prose style that is casual, but tough. In his special field, that of the unpredictable and daffy, Mr. Mitchell is an expert.”
—Stanley Walker, The Herald Tribune