Up in the Old Hotel
  • Published: 18 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099561590
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 736
  • RRP: $29.99

Up in the Old Hotel

Formats & editions
Paperback
18 Sep 2012
Tr. Paperback
7 Sep 1993
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'Mitchell bottled and preserved more of the soul of New York than any man before or since; Up in the Old Hotel is required reading for anyone who wants to hear the lost voices of the city' Tim Adams, Observer

'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwan

Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays.

Written between 1943 and 1965, Up 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.


'Joseph Mitchell is buried treasure' Salman Rushdie
  • Published: 18 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099561590
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 736
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Joseph Mitchell

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. "Joe Gould's Secret," which appeared on September 26th 1964, was the last piece Mitchell ever published. He went into work at The New Yorker almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months but submitted no further writing.

Also by Joseph Mitchell

Joe Gould's Secret
The Bottom Of The Harbor
See all

Praise for Up in the Old Hotel

Swift, razor-sharp characterisation, narrative suspense and the sparest, yet most penetrating description

Evening Standard

One of the greatest journalists America has produced

Times Literary Supplement

What James Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism

Newsweek

A poet of the waterfront and a writer of surpassing tales that captured the unsung and unconventional life of New York and its denizens

Independent

Remarkable

John Fowles

If Borges had been a New Yorker he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret

Martin Amis

An original... Civilised, intelligent, kind, humorous

Doris Lessing

[Mitchell’s] portrait of old New York is unmatchable

Big Issue

It is a teeming confection of the kind of people you wish to meet in a city, but would never quite have the guts to spend time with

Stuart Ever's blog

Comparing a journalist's oeuvre with the titanic Ulysses may appear presumptuous, but Mitchell shared Joyce's obsessive interest in the odd corners and overlooked eccentrics of urban life… Mitchell produced pure gold… his book has some of the finest feature writing published

Christopher Hirst, Independent

This is a book about New York as it was a long time ago… Mitchell is interested in the texture of the city. He loves the cops and bums and old Italian restaurants. After a while you really feel engrained in the place yourself

William Leith, Evening Standard

A work of consummate artistry

Jake Kerridge, Sunday Telegraph

Mitchell is a superb writer and this collection is a treasure

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