SOURCE: A review of Up in the Old Hotel, in The American Spectator, Vol. 26, No. 2, February, 1993, pp. 62-3.

In the following review, Mysak welcomes the publication of Up in the Old Hotel and briefly describes the subjects of some of Mitchell's best-known stories.

Joseph Mitchell, now 84, is the last of those great New Yorker writers of the magazine's heyday. Most of us got to know him through Brendan Gill's Here at The New Yorker, in which Gill profiled all the magazine's great stylists—White, Thurber, Benchley, Liebling, Gibbs, McNulty, Maloney, Edmund Wilson—and putMitchell at the top of the list. Up in the Old Hotel collects four Mitchell books: McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (1943), Old Mr. Flood (1948), The Bottom of the Harbor (1960), and Joe Gould's Secret (1965). For anyone who is not familiar with Mitchell—and his work has been out of circulation for so long that it is tough to...