Joe Gould was a Harvard educated bohemian who lived in and around New York from 1916 until his death in 1957.  He was close friends with e.e. cumings and Ezra Pound and worked for a time as a literary reviewer.  Gould claimed to be working on a gigantic book of overheard conversations which he called An Oral History of Our Time.  Joe Gould gained some notoriety from a 19 page profile which Mitchell published in the December 4, 1942 edition titled Professor Seagull.  It's an engaging piece, you can read it starting on page 52 of your book if you wish, but it's not required reading for class, because much of the story is revealed in a second profile of Joe Gould which Mitchell pubished after Joe Gould's death.  This second profile, Joe Gould's Secret, is a 100 page long story that was published in two parts in the September 11 and 18, 1964 editions of the magazines.

As David Remnick says in his introduction to Up in the Old Hotel, "perhaps the most obvious and interesting transformation to linger over is the one that takes place in the distance between Professor Sea Gull and Joe Gould’s Secret, which was published in 1964, seven years after Gould died in a psychiatric hospital. In that piece, we not only learn the painful truth about Gould—that there was no oral history, that his pretensions were all a lie, and that his day-to-day existence was an agony—but also glimpse the core of Mitchell himself.  Joe Gould’s Secret is Mitchell’s masterpiece. It was also, of course, his last piece. He never published again. For the next thirty-one years and six months, Mitchell came to work almost every day and submitted not even a story for The Talk of the Town. No one was more esteemed by the staff than this courtly, soft-spoken genius, and no one but a fool would ask about his silence. There were theories about what might have hindered him: some great personal sadness, the weight of reputation, the radical changes in New York. “I can’t seem to get anything finished anymore,” he admitted when he was in his eighties. “The hideous state the world is in just defeats the kind of writing I used to do.”"

Remnick calls Joe Gould's secret "a masterpiece" and it has captivated and confounded many since its publication.  A movie was made of it staring Stanley Tucci in the year 2000 which you can watch HERE.  More recently in 2017 Jill Lepore wrote a short book titled Joe Gould's Teeth, which is a masterful feat of investigative reporting in which she uncovers much more biographical detail surrounding Joe Gould, including whether or not he truly wrote An Oral History of Our Time.