SOURCE: "Joe Mitchell's Secret," in The Atlantic, Vol. 270, No. 2, August, 1992, pp. 97-9.

In the following review of Up in the Old Hotel, Blount suggests reasons for Mitchell's decision to stop publishing after 1965, focusing on his experiences with Joe Gould.

If I could play around with time, I would make myself alive and literate on that week in 1940 when I could flip suspensefully through the latest New Yorker (whose table of contents in those days was minimal), come upon a piece titled "Lady Olga," savor its first sentence ("Jane Barnell occasionally considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living"), scan its first paragraph, jump ahead a number of pages to the byline, and exclaim:

"Oh, glory. Joseph Mitchell has profiled a bearded lady."

I did have the pleasure, in 1964, of devouring fresh out of that magazine Mitchell's series...