Joe Gould’s Secret by Joseph Mitchell

 

Good long short memoir about an eccentric Greenwich Village character in the 1940s and 1950 who claimed to be writing an oral history of modern world but turned out to be doing not so much, simply revising again and again the same several chapters of his own early life. But how he was lovingly supported by hundreds of intellectuals and others in Manhattan, and cherished for his oddness.

Driven to this by my reading of the Harry Smith bio of Szwed, as Smith and Gould share many similarities.