McSorley's wonderful saloon
By: Joseph Mitchell ; foreword by Calvin Trillin.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2001
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 370
Subjects: Bars (Drinking establishments) -- Fiction.; Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Fiction.; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life. "King of the Gypsies" sets out to describe the spokesman of 38 gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon's decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also more imaginative than recent novels. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that resembles Dickens'.--From Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic.