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Sign up todayMan in Profile
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Learn moreThis fascinating biography reveals the untold story of the legendary New Yorker profile writer—author of Joe Gould’s Secret and Up in the Old Hotel—and unravels the mystery behind one of literary history’s greatest disappearing acts.
Born and raised in North Carolina, Joseph Mitchell was Southern to the core. But from the 1930s to the 1960s, he was the voice of New York City. Readers of the New Yorker cherished his intimate sketches of the people who made the city tick—from Mohawk steelworkers to Staten Island oystermen, from homeless intellectual Joe Gould to Old John McSorley, founder of the city’s— most famous saloon. Mitchell’s literary sensibility combined with a journalistic eye for detail produced a writing style that would inspire New Journalism luminaries such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion.
Then, all of a sudden, his stories stopped appearing. For thirty years, Mitchell showed up for work at the New Yorker—but produced nothing. Did he have something new and exciting in store? Was he working on a major project? Or was he bedeviled by an epic case of writer’s block?
The first full-length biography of Joseph Mitchell, based on the thousands of archival pages he left behind and dozens of interviews, Man in Profile pieces together the life of this beloved and enigmatic literary legend and answers the question that has plagued readers and critics for decades: What was Joe Mitchell doing all those years?
By the time of his death in 1996, Mitchell was less well known for his elegant writing than for his J. D. Salinger–like retreat from the public eye. For thirty years, Mitchell had wandered the streets of New York, chronicling the lives of everyday people and publishing them in the most prestigious publication in town. But by the 1970s, crime, homelessness, and a crumbling infrastructure had transformed the city Mitchell understood so well and spoke for so articulately. He could barely recognize it. As he said to a friend late in life, “I’m living in a state of confusion.”
Fifty years after his last story appeared and almost two decades after his death, Joseph Mitchell still has legions of fans, and his story—especially the mystery of his “disappearance”—continues to fascinate. With a colorful cast of characters that includes Harold Ross, A. J. Liebling, Tina Brown, James Thurber, and William Shawn, Man in Profile goes a long way to solving that mystery—and bringing this lion of American journalism out of the shadows that once threatened to swallow him.
Thomas Kunkel is the president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. He has served as president of American Journalism Review and as dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of several books, including Genius in Disguise, Enormous Prayers, and Letters from the Editor.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
Reviews
“A revelatory portrait…a celebration of the hidden people and places of New York City, and a literary mystery of the first order.”
“Excellent…Joseph Mitchell devotees—and we are many—do not tire of thinking or talking about the man…[A] first-rate Mitchell biography.”
“[An] authoritative new biography…Kunkel is the ideal biographer of Joseph Mitchell.”
“A richly persuasive portrait of a man who cared about everybody and everything.”
“Mitchell’s life and achievements are brought vividly alive in [this] splendid book.”
“A compelling book on one of the more revered journalists of the twentieth century, warts and all.”
“[A] long-awaited biography of this demon-driven journalist…lovingly unearthed.”
“For those in love with the New Yorker, this tale of a bygone period in the magazine’s history will be nirvana. For those interested in writers’ lives, it will be the start of a hunt for Mitchell’s own books.”
“A vivid portrait of the writer…chronicling the lives of some of [New York City’s] most colorful denizens.”
“Narrator Joe Barrett’s gravelly, expressive voice, which employs subtle characterization, is perfectly matched to the precise and confident prose…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“Kunkel probes Joseph Mitchell’s life and career with empathy and unflinching reportage.”
“Joseph Mitchell, the finest reporter ever published in the New Yorker, is fortunate to have Thomas Kunkel as his biographer. This is a beautiful book.”
“This insightful, thorough, and well told account of Mitchell’s life and work will go a long way toward bringing him the wider recognition he deserves.”
“Joseph Mitchell was the great artist/reporter of the twentieth century, cousin as a stylist to Twain and Joyce. Reading Man in Profile is like talking to Mitchell on intimate terms after finishing one of his exact and lyrical stories.”
“I enjoyed this book immensely. It helped me hear how much of the magic in Joseph Mitchell’s writing had to do with his cadence, his use of lists, concrete facts. It brought me inside his methods—of walking, lingering, visiting, and the way his work seeped into his life and vice versa. Some of Mitchell’s writing quoted in the book appears here for the first time, and it is thrilling to read it. Now and then I put the book down so I could savor it and think through the many ironies, layers, and textures Thomas Kunkel has brought before us about this singular writer and man.”
“A three-dimensional portrait of a conflicted Southerner who fled his cotton-and-tobacco-farm childhood to spend most of his adult life in passionate acquisition of the people, the parks, the buildings, the bridges and waterways, the graveyards, and, pacing every inch of them, the very sidewalks of New York. Thomas Kunkel gives readers, Mitchellites, and newcomers alike not just a Man in Profile but a great writer in all his holistic glory.”
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