"This is a book about New York as it was a long time ago. Mitchell is interested in the texture of the city. He loves the cops and bums and old Italian restaurants. After a while you really feel engrained in the place yourself" -- William Leith Evening Standard "Swift, razor-sharp characterisation, narrative suspense and the sparest, yet most penetrating description" Evening Standard "One of the greatest journalists America has produced" Times Literary Supplement "What James Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism" Newsweek "A poet of the waterfront and a writer of surpassing tales that captured the unsung and unconventional life of New York and its denizens" Independent

Joseph Mitchell was born near Iona, North Carolina, in 1908, and came to New York City in 1929, when he was twenty-one years old. He eventually found a job as an apprentice crime reporter for The World. He also worked as a reporter and features writer at The Herald Tribune and The World-Telegram before landing at The New Yorker in 1938. "Joe Gould's Secret," which appeared on September 26th 1964, was the last piece Mitchell ever published. He went into work at The New Yorker almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months but submitted no further writing.