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Overview
As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers.These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become.
Synopsis
As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers.
These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become.
New York Times Book Review - Jimmy Breslin
. . . a small book of stories from Mitchell's city-room days at two New York City newspapers . . . [The stories] were written before World War II and they are as good now as they were when he wrote them.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
All over America, used-book dealers are kicking themselves because My Ears Are Bent is back in print. First published in 1938, this collection of newspaper articles helped give Mitchell a national reputation, but Mitchell, who died in 1996, never permitted his publishers to reprint this assemblage of his early New York World Telegram pieces. Consequently, even battered copies of this legendary book became collectible. (First editions fetch as much as $2,000.) As well they should: Mitchell's vintage interviews with fan dancers, inner city evangelists, downtown cabbies, and conjurers seem to gather meaning with age. The author of Joe Gould's Secret wrote like a gritty angel.Jimmy Breslin
. . . a small book of stories from Mitchell's city-room days at two New York City newspapers . . . [The stories] were written before World War II and they are as good now as they were when he wrote them.— New York Times Book Review
From The Critics
Thanks in part to the modest success of the film Joe Gould's Secret—in which Stanley Tucci played New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell—Mitchell's reputation is enjoying a modest renaissance. The North Carolina-born journalist and essayist is best known for his quirky portraits of lowlifes, drunkards, B-girls and other assorted tall-tale tellers who lived on the fringes of New York during the first half of the twentieth century. The stories and sketches included in this book—last published in a slightly different form in 1938—allow one to view the writer's understated charm, wit and knack for dialogue. The characters here are familiar Mitchell types—a wrestling promoter with a soft spot for freaks, a striptease artist who begins her act naked and concludes fully clothed, a Jewish "Reverend" who has conducted more than 10,000 marriages. Best of all is Mitchell's evocative description of the lives of New York's homeless. This edition's editors have added a section not included in the 1938 version; in this chapter, Mitchell reports his encounters with the celebrities George Bernard Shaw and George M. Cohan. Surprisingly, these essays, perfunctory and guarded, are the weakest in an otherwise engaging and sprightly book, suggesting that Mitchell was at his best chronicling the lives of the unheralded and the unknown.—Adam Langer
(Excerpted Review)