My Ears Are Bent - by Joseph Mitchell (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1938, "My Ears Are Bent," a collection of Mitchell's acclaimed newspaper pieces, was published. That book, unavailable for more than 60 years, is now restored to print.

Book Synopsis

Famed New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, as a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers.

These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become.

Review Quotes

"My Ears Are Bent sparkles with laughter and exuberance."
--Los Angeles Times

"This reporter, prose stylist and observer of life remains that vanished world's Scheherezade."
--The Washington Post

"These stories, the tales of the people he has talked to in the course of his wanderings about New York, are done with a sharp eye for the revealing detail, and in a prose that is casual, but tough."
--Stanley Walker, The Herald Tribune

"Delicacies from the first nine years of Mitchell's career."
--Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Joseph Mitchell was born near Iona, North Carolina, in 1908, and came to New York City in 1929, when he was twenty-one years old. He eventually found a job as an apprentice crime reporter for The World. He also worked as a reporter and features writer at The Herald Tribune and The World-Telegram before landing at The New Yorker in 1938, where he remained until his death in 1996.