ENG 470: Creative Nonfiction

A nice tribute to Joseph Mitchell from a 1992 NYT book review. “Mr. Mitchell’s art is to elicit history from an enormous range of people, and then to cause their words to fall into a shape that gives the reader none of the agony the unreconstructed reveries of these long-winded men might have done…. Though Mr. Mitchell loves the Bowery preachers and the tavern owners and the gypsies of old New York, his favorite figures are the men who lived and worked on New York’s waterfront. In presenting the people he wrote about — often homeless, always eccentric — Mr. Mitchell seems to me to be posing a tacit question about the character and value of his own life, of life itself.”