McSorley's Wonderful SaloonNew 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. |
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User Review - dandelionroots - LibraryThingEventual journalist for the New Yorker who came to the city at the onset of the Great Depression catalogs his encounters (often numerous) with characters from gypsies, indians, and bearded ladies to ... Read full review
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User Review - nigeyb - LibraryThingUp in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret. I ... Read full review
Contents
The Old House at Home | 3 |
Hit on the Head with a Cow | 40 |
Professor Sea Gull | 52 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
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Bibliographic information
| Title | McSorley's Wonderful Saloon |
| Author | Joseph Mitchell |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books, 2001 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | Mar 11, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0375421025, 9780375421020 |
| Length | 370 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |