Joe Gould's Secret

Joseph Mitchell came to New York City in 1929 from a small farming town called Fairmont, in the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina. He was twenty-one years old. He worked as a reporter and feature writer--for The World, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York World-Telegram--for eight years, and then went to The New Yorker, where he worked off and on until his death in 1996.