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Joseph Mitchell’s and Joe Gould’s Secret
Thanks for this! I think when I read that part of Lepore the first time, I assumed that what was in the trunks was just more of Gould's rewritings of the same few essays over and over again. But you're right: Lepore is at pains to point out that the one notebook Mitchell received from Lowe did contain some actual oral history. I'm going to have to reread the Lepore, more charitably this time. If you haven't read Thomas Kunkel's biography of Mitchell, you should--it's really a delight. And he also discusses the question of the accuracy of Mitchell's profiles. Thanks again!— October 15, 2020 3:59 p.m.
Joseph Mitchell’s and Joe Gould’s Secret
I really enjoyed reading this thoughtful piece. I too have struggled with how to reconcile Mitchell's claim that his profiles are accurate depictions of real people with his use of composites and extended quotations that are manifestly too long for him to have written down verbatim. But I have to say that I came away from Lepore's book unconvinced that "Joe Gould's Secret" is inaccurate: she did not, I think, show that Gould's oral history *actually* existed (or that more of it existed than Mitchell noted), just that more of it *might* have existed and that Mitchell gave up looking for it (something that Mitchell himself acknowledges in his second profile). It's because of this that I wonder whether it's really a fair characterization of the situation to say, as you do, that "Mitchell wrote that the History never existed; later, he found out that it did. He made no correction." But perhaps there's more to the story that I don't know about: did someone else definitively show that the oral history *actually* existed?— October 15, 2020 8:30 a.m.