The Best Writer in America

Until his death in 1996, and although he had published nothing for the last three decades of his life, Joseph Mitchell was considered by many of his peers the greatest living master of English prose. This fact had largely escaped my notice until I read a brilliant appreciation of him by Raymond J. Rundus in The Sewanee Review (Winter 2005). Mitchell's reputation rests on four collections of his stories, most of them factual, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker between 1938 and 1964. These were gathered together and published by Random House in 1992 under the title Up in the Old Hotel. Today I picked up a copy at Barnes and Noble, and I can confirm that Mitchell's reputation is definitely well deserved. Despite his early productivity, for the last thirty years of his life he was also a famous victim of "writer's block." He haunts Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1987) in the character referred to as "the Ghost." Up in the Old Hotel is a book to savor and study.