SOURCE: "Paragon of Reporters: Joseph Mitchell," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCI, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 167-84.

In the following essay, Perrin provides a detailed summary of Mitchell's career, attempting to show the development of his craft and the means by which he transformed reporting into an art.

There are, at a generous estimate, about a dozen North Carolinians who belong to American literature. That's not meant as a slur. There are states, my own included, where you'd be hard pressed to find five. North Carolina has Thomas Wolfe, of course. And it has O. Henry and Charles Chesnutt—the first important black novelist this country ever produced—and Doris Betts and Reynolds Price. It also has Joseph Mitchell—in some ways the least known of the whole dozen, and in some ways the most remarkable.

What is remarkable about Mitchell, or one of the things, is that he...