Joseph Mitchell

I was recently invited to make an illustration of my favourite author for Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time! and here it is! 

Joseph Mitchell was a newspaper reporter early in his career and a New Yorker contributor from 1938 until his death in 1996 (although mysteriously, though he kept his office and would show up to work every day, he never published another word after 1964).

Mitchell wrote the most incredibly intimate portraits of people about town and was able to evoke, somehow, all the delicate specificities of life in Manhattan and its environs. In his rambling and untiring prose he strings you along, with hardly any idea of what you're reading about or where it's going, and you find yourself laughing out loud and devouring tens of pages and growing curious about our little histories, here, and all the telling, wonderful, meaningful things around us, were we just to look around.

His work reads romantically about a time and a place now forgotten--some America more naive, more hopeful, newly built, already old, with sawdust on the floors and gypsy's packed in old cars and wild grapes on Staten Island and good old men always by the river--rich, vibrant, lively communities of regular people passing the time. Read him if you get a chance; and look around, I guess.