A portrait of one of New York City’s greatest writers and, for the first time, his decades-long literary silence

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From the publisher:

From 1938 to 1964, Joseph Mitchell published unforgettable profiles as a staff writer at The New Yorker, portraits of ordinary people in disappearing worlds on the edges of New York City. Then his byline vanished from print. For thirty-one years, the story goes, he went to his office almost every day, worked behind a closed door, and never submitted another piece.

Through a chance encounter with one of Mitchell’s closest friends and a meticulous examination of new and unpublished material, Scott Schomburg discovers another Mitchell, one who was engaged in a different form of writing: an obsessive collecting and note-taking that he hoped would preserve lives otherwise lost to time. It was a restless pursuit of the eternal in the everyday of a dying world.

Following in Mitchell’s footsteps from his childhood in the swamps of North Carolina to his last years in a rapidly changing New York, The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell is a revelation of new insight about a legendary writer and his work. Schomburg’s lucid and poignant narrative captures Mitchell’s unique blend of the apocalyptic and elegiac. It’s the kind of story Mitchell himself might have written.