Although in many ways the quintessential New Yorker, nonfiction writer Joseph Mitchell always remained close to his North Carolina roots and credited his Robeson County upbringing as the nurturing ground of his passion for storytelling. He was born on a tobacco and cotton farm near Fairmont and continued to own and farm a piece of land on the edge of Ashpole Swamp until his last years. Mitchell attended the University of North Carolina for four years but left for a reporting job in Durham before attaining his degree. In 1929, a feature story he wrote about a tobacco auction caught the attention of a New York editor, and he moved to the city that would remain his home for the rest of his life.

For his first nine years in New York, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the Morning World, the Herald Tribune, and the World-Telegram, developing his spare, elegant style with beautifully crafted stories about the city's streets and the quirky characters who peopled them. In 1938, he went to The New Yorker as a feature writer and spent the next fifty-eight years there, writing "Talk of the Town" and profiles of the denizens of the streets, the waterfront and the saloons. He kept an office at the magazine until his death at 87. His keen powers of observation combined with his humor, sympathy, wit and style helped set a standard for writers of nonfiction. Most of Joseph Mitchell's stories were centered on New York, but some, including "Hit Over the Head with a Cow" and "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County," came straight out of his Robeson County upbringing. A devoted birder, he once spent more than an hour in North Carolina's Ashpole Swamp watching a pileated woodpecker tear the bark off a dead black-gum tree and said he considered it the most spectacular event he had ever witnessed.

In 1931, Joseph Mitchell married photographer Therese Dagny Engelstead Jacobsen, who died in 1980. The couple had two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth. Mitchell's first book, My Ears Are Bent, published in 1938, is a collection of his best newspaper stories. His book McSorley's Wonderful Saloon has been called New York's Dubliners. Other collections of his work are Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor and Joe Gould's Secret, and he also collaborated with Edmund Wilson on Apologies to the Iroquois. He received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965 and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1984. In 1992, most of his New Yorker pieces were collected in a single volume titled Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, introducing his masterful craftsmanship and storytelling technique to a whole new generation of readers.

Joseph Mitchell has been called "the paragon of reporters." Calvin Trillin called him "the New Yorker reporter who set the standard." He was such a perfectionist about his work that he would not let even his close friends and associates see what he was working on until it was in print. In 1983, critic Noel Perrin called Joe Mitchell one of "the dozen North Carolinians who belong to American literature, [along with O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Chesnutt]." Perrin went on to say that Joe Mitchell was "in some ways the least known . . . and in some ways the most remarkable."

Excerpt from I Blame It All on Mamma
from McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943

I was in the tenth grade when I became one of her admirers. At that time, in 1924, she was unmarried and had just come up from Charleston to cook in the station restaurant. It was the biggest restaurant in Stonewall; railroad men ate there, and so did hands from the sawmill, the cotton gin, and the chewing-tobacco factory. After school I used to hang around the station. I would sit on a bench beside the track and watch the Negro freight hands load boxcars with bales of cotton. Some afternoons she would come out of the kitchen and sit on the bench beside me. She was a handsome, big-hipped woman with coal-black hair and a nice grin, and the station agent must have liked her, because he let her behave pretty much as she pleased. She cooked in her bare feet and did not bother to put shoes on when she came out for a breath of fresh air. “I had an aunt,” she told me, “who got the dropsy from wearing shoes in a hot kitchen.” ...Miss Copey had not worked at the restaurant long before she got acquainted with Mr. Thunderbolt Calhoun. He has a watermelon farm on the bank of Shad Roe River in a section of the county called Egypt. He is so sleepy and slow he has been known as Thunderbolt ever since he was a boy; his true name is Rutherford Calhoun. He is shiftless and most of his farm work is done by a Negro hired boy named Mister. (When this boy was born his mother said, “White people claim they won’t mister a Negro. Well, by God, son, they’ll mister you!”) Mr. Thunderbolt’s fifteen-acre farm is fertile and it grows the finest Cuban Queen, Black Gipsy, and Irish Gray watermelons I have ever seen. The farm is just a sideline, however; his principal interest in life is a copper still hidden on the bank of a bayou in the river swamp. In this still he produces a vehement kind of whiskey known as tanglefoot. “I depend on watermelons to pay the taxes and feed me and my mule,” he says. “The whiskey is pure profit.” Experts say that his tanglefoot is as good as good Kentucky bourbon, and he claims that laziness makes it so. “You have to be patient to make good whiskey,” he says, yawning, “and I’m an uncommonly patient man.” After Miss Copey began buying her whiskey from him, she went on sprees more often; his whiskey did not give her hangovers or what she called “the dismals.” At least once a month, usually on a Saturday afternoon, she would leave her kitchen and walk barefooted down Main Street, singing a hymn at the top of her voice, and she seldom got below Main and Jefferson before she was under arrest.

Apologies to the Iroquois. Edmund Wilson. With a study of "The Mohawks in High Steel" by Joseph Mitchell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960.

The Bottom of the Harbor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.

Joe Gould's Secret. New York: Viking Press, 1965.

McSorley's Wonderful Saloon. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

My Ears Are Bent. New York: Sheridan House, 1938.

Old Mr. Flood. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.

Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Mr. Mitchell was a writer for the New Yorker magazine.

Additional information on Mr. Mitchell can be found in:

Hyman, Stanley E. "The Art of Joseph Mitchell." In The Critic's Credentials: Essays and Reviews, edited by Phoebe Pettingel, 79-85. New York: Atheneum, 1978.

"Joseph Mitchell: Three Generations of New Yorker Writers Remember the City's Incomparable Chronicler." New Yorker, Vol. 72, No. 15 (June 10, 1996): 78-83.

Perrin, Noel. "Paragon of Reporters: Joseph Mitchell." Sewanee Review 91 (1983): 167-184.

Rundus, Raymond J. "'Imprisoned by the Past': Joseph Mitchell, Poet Laureate of Enthropy." Pembroke 26 (1994): 37-47.

Sims, Norman. "Joseph Mitchell as 'Literary Journalist.'" Pembroke 26 (1994): 32-34.

Smoller, Sanford J. "Rosebushes and Bones: Joseph Mitchell's Enduring Values." Pembroke 26 (1994): 10-31.

Links to further information:

Mitchell's Obituary-The Associated Press, May 26, 1996