# Joseph Mitchell (writer)

Joseph Quincy Mitchell (July 27, 1908 – May 24, 1996) was an American writer best known for his works of creative nonfiction he published in The New Yorker. His work primarily consists of character studies, where he used detailed portraits of people and events to highlight the commonplace of the world, especially in and around New York City.

## Biography
### Early life

Mitchell was born on July 27, 1908, on his maternal grandfather's farm near Fairmont, North Carolina, and was the son of Averette Nance and Elizabeth Amanda Parker Mitchell. He had five younger siblings: Jack, Elizabeth, Linda, Harry, and Laura. Mitchell's father, a fourth generation cotton and tobacco farmer, was a Southerner steeped in the values of the Baptist church, and he tried to instill these values into his children. As his eldest son, Averette hoped that Mitchell would someday take over the family business and continue the family's legacy.
Mitchell's adventurous personality as a child contradicted his father's staunch work ethic and traditional Southern values. From a young age, Mitchell was deeply touched by nature. He loved to climb trees, and it was one of the few activities that allowed an outlet for his young imagination to develop. He also tended to escape to the swamps surrounding his father's property as often as he could, as it allowed him to feel connected to the world around him. Mitchell stated, "the water mesmerized me; everything in it interested me, still or moving, dead or alive."

### Education

Mitchell left home and attended college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1925. As a journalism major, he was "a solid if not superior student," and he was successful in humanities courses such as history, language, music, and literature and explored classes in nearly every subject. Aside from his studies, he began writing for the campus literary magazine and newspaper as a sports reporter. Because he had no aptitude for mathematics, he was unable to successfully finish his degree. He left college and moved to New York City in 1929.

### Family

On February 27, 1932, he married Therese Jacobsen, a reporter and photographer. They remained married until her death in 1980, and had two daughters, Nora and Elizabeth.

### Mental health

Joseph Mitchell suffered from depression all of his life. An unsteady relationship with his father and his lack of belonging in his two homes of North Carolina and New York left Mitchell isolated and listless for much of his life. He lived in an era of psychology that focused purely on anxiety, and doctors regarded depression as a severe side effect of existing anxiety. However, symptoms of this condition did not clearly manifest in his life until late in his career. Many of Mitchell's coworkers, as well as his biographer, Thomas Kunkel, tell of the toll the subjects of his works had on him, specifically his greatest subject, Joe Gould. Mitchell once remarked to Washington Post writer David Streitfeld, "You pick someone so close that, in fact, you are writing about yourself. Joe Gould had to leave home because he didn't fit in, the same way I had to leave home because I didn't fit in. Talking to Joe Gould all those years he became me in a way, if you see what I mean." Even with Joe Gould as a way to explore his own reality, Mitchell began to attract characters with similar attributes. In a feature within The New Yorker magazine, Charles McGrath notes that "the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman first pointed out that the people Mitchell wrote about more and more resembled himself: loners, depressives, nostalgists, haunters of the waterfront, cherishers of arcane information. The characters in his pieces began to share a similar voice; they all sounded a little like Mitchell."
From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything further, other than the "Author's Note" introducing Up in the Old Hotel. Although he struggled to publish, he did write hundreds of pages of manuscripts for several pieces, including his own memoir, which Thomas Kunkel used extensively in writing Mitchell's biography. After he died, his colleague Roger Angell wrote:
   Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.
While his battle with mental illness continued in the workplace, he was known by his family as a dependable and caring father and husband at home. Therese Jacobson and their children, Nora and Elizabeth, retained nothing but fond memories of their father, even though they knew he was struggling in his career.

### Death

In 1995, Mitchell was diagnosed with lung cancer after he began experiencing back pain. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized in his brain. On May 24, 1996, Mitchell died at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 87. He was laid to rest in Floyd Memorial Cemetery in his hometown of Fairmont, North Carolina next to his wife. On his gravestone his daughters inscribed a quote from Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet, one of his favorite lines in literature: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."