Painting of McSorley's bar by John Sloan, 1912
In the first class, we'll introduce each other and get to know each other a bit. Please come to class with a few sentences describing your personal connection, if any, to New York City, or the New Yorker Magazine, or literature in general.
The 12 pages to the right are two stories from Joseph Mitchell's newspaper reporting days in the 1930's, before he joined the New Yorker. Contrast them with Mitchell's writing style in The Old House at Home, below. Click the pop-out icon in the upper right side of the box to the right, to open up the document. It looks like this:
Study Questions for Bar and Grill, and The Year of Our Lord 1936, or Hit Me William
What examples of Mitchell's prose did you particularly enjoy?
What parts did you find particularly funny and why?
What is your reaction to these characters? Empathy, pity, condescension, appreciation, identification? Why?
What is Mitchell's attitude toward Gilligan Holton?
What do these stories tell us about New York City?
How does Mitchell's writing in these two stories compare with his New Yorker writing in The Old House at Home, below?
Please read the 19 pages of the story, The Old House At Home, the first story in Up in the Old Hotel starting on page 3, or if you would like to print the pages so you can mark them up, to the right is a pdf:
1 The Old House at Home pdf2.pdfOf the many characters in this story, which did you like best and why?
What examples of Mitchell's prose did you particularly enjoy?
What emotions does Mitchell conjure up in the story and how does he do it?
What parts did you find particularly funny?
Why is the history of McSorley's important to John McSorely, to the patrons, to Mitchell and to us?
What was the New Yorker trying to tell us with this story? Why should we care?
What are your thoughts about the ending of the story?
There is a published biography of Joseph Mitchell called Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker, but it's 345 pages long and rather than read it, I'll include some excerpts from the biography, along with three short memoir pieces Mitchell wrote late in life. Part of our task will be to puzzle out who he was and how and why he wrote the things he did. Mitchell's biographer, Thomas Kunkel, said that "Literary journalism is the convergence of superior reportage and writing that manages to be both penetrating and transcendent. Put another way, it is everyday life transported to the realm of art. It is a union that occurs rarely. Joseph Mitchell was the greatest literary journalist of his time—some would have it of all time. With prodigious skills of observation, with curiosity and empathy, with prose as unforced as it was precise, Mitchell crafted some of the most memorable characters in the nonfiction canon. Other New Yorker writers, like his stablemate Liebling, would travel the world or turn to politics or business or war to find compelling subjects; Mitchell found his around the corner, virtually without leaving the city limits of New York, which as a young newspaperman he came to know intimately by walking neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. To say that Mitchell wrote about New York, however, is to say that his hero wrote about Dublin. Mitchell, like Joyce, simply used his city as the canvas for stories that went to the heart of the human condition." Kunkel, Thomas. Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (pp. 8-9). (Function). Kindle Edition.
A good biographical overview can be found on Mitchell's page in Wikipedia, to the right. Read it over.
Study Question
How do you think Mitchell's background influenced his writing and his career?
