Joseph Mitchell's New York

Photo by Therese Mitchell/Courtesy the estate of Joseph Mitchell

Mid-Century New York City: as Seen Through the New Yorker Stories of Joseph Mitchell

Course Information

SGL Name: Ollie Curme

Course Meeting Times/Dates: Mondays, 11:10am to 12:35pm, March 10 through April 7

Contact information of SGL: ocurme@gmail.com, 781-760-4971

ZOOM Link for Course Meetings: https://brandeis.zoom.us/j/7817604971?pwd=ajhVaW5xSFdZQjhUY0FFWU5hMDJyUT09

Meeting ID: 781 760 4971

Password: bolli

Welcome Letter

Welcome to Mid-Century New York City: as Seen Through the New Yorker Stories of Joseph Mitchell! In this course we'll go back 70 years or so and explore the unique people and places that Joseph Mitchell so beautifully wrote about. Each week, through a facilitated discussion, we’ll analyze these stories together. Please come prepared to engage with the group about each story and learn from each other.

A brief housekeeping item: when you receive this email, please Reply (not Reply All) to me so that I know you received it and our email communications are in order.

Course Text

There is only one required book: Up in the Old Hotel. The other two books previously mentioned (My Ears are Bent, a collection of his newspaper reporting, and the biography Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker) will be excerpted by me and sections included in the weekly readings. Up in the Old Hotel is available on Amazon, although it's much cheaper on Abebooks. Either Kindle, hardback or softcover are fine.

Website and Assignments

I've put together a course website with the reading assignments and study questions for each of our five classes.

Here is the Home Page:

https://sites.google.com/view/joseph-mitchells-new-york/home

You may wish to bookmark that page, as it has the Zoom link we will use throughout the course.

Here is a Reading Guide: https://sites.google.com/view/joseph-mitchells-new-york/reading-guide

And here is the page for our first class on March 10:

https://sites.google.com/view/joseph-mitchells-new-york/march-10

Please be sure to read all of the material on each week’s page. Read each story at least twice—the first time to get the overall sense of the story, and the subsequent close reading(s) to analyze the story, considering the study questions I've included.

Joining the Meeting

We’ll be meeting on Mondays, March 10 through April 7th, from 11:10am-12:35 am EST. Here is the Zoom link for all our meetings: https://brandeis.zoom.us/j/7817604971pwd=ajhVaW5xSFdZQjhUY0FFWU5hMDJyUT09

Meeting ID: 781 760 4971

Password: bolli

It’s the same every week, and is also posted on the course website home page,, along with my email address in case you need to contact me.

Class Guidelines

I will use some basic ground rules to keep our discussions on track:

● Read all the assignments before class.

● Keep yourself on mute but unmute when you raise your hand, so that you’re ready to speak when I call on you.

● Raise your hands electronically.

● Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.

● Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.

● Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.

● Listen to and respond to others with respect.

● Please let me know ahead of time if you will be unable to attend class

Zoom Update

Please check to see that you have the latest version of Zoom. To do this, open Zoom, click on the Zoom menu in the upper left, then click 'Check for Updates'. If there is a newer version available, it will prompt you to update. If you are not sure, you can also redownload Zoom from https://zoom.us/download. If you are using Zoom on an iPhone or tablet, you must update from the App store. You may have difficulty joining the meeting if your Zoom is not up to date. Please also familiarize yourself with the updated Zoom interface and be sure you know where to find the controls to raise/lower your hand and mute/unmute your audio.

Welcome Session

I will hold a Welcome Session exactly one week prior to class, on Monday March 3 at 11:10am on Zoom. This is an optional session, but I strongly encourage you to attend, to meet me and the other class members, work out any tech issues, and answer any questions you might have. I hope you can attend, and look forward to seeing you.

Thank you for signing up for this class. I'm looking forward to meeting all of you and exploring together the stories of Joseph Mitchell!

Best regards,

Ollie Curme

phone: 781-760-4971

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Joseph Mitchell arrived in New York City in 1929 and quickly became a celebrated newspaper reporter, chronicling crime and writing features about all manner of New Yorkers, from famous celebrities to flea-circus operators, oystermen, ship captains, fan dancers, and nudists. In 1938 Mitchell joined the non-fiction desk at the New Yorker magazine, where he specialized in long form portraits of common people looking back on their lives, remembering a New York City that was outrageous, exciting, and fading from view. Malcolm Cowley of the New Republic said, “Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that curiously resembles Dickens’: a continual wonder at the sights and sounds of a big city, a continual devouring interest in all the strange people who live there, a continual impulse to burst into praise of kind hearts and good food and down with hypocrisy.”

Mitchell was highly prolific in the 1930’s and 1940’s and then his work dwindled as the pre-war New York culture died and a modern culture rose up to take its place. He stayed on the New Yorker staff until his death in 1996.

We’ll read portions of his collected works, focusing on his mid-century New Yorker pieces. In addition to celebrating his craft as a writer, we’ll explore the messages Mitchell was trying to tell us and question how these poignant stories can elicit such a heartfelt response in us so many years later.

Readings

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

This is the complete collection of Mitchell's stories published in the New Yorker and is required for this course. The stories are mostly from the 1940's and 1950's and show Mitchell at the peak of his career.