SOURCE: "Joseph Mitchell, Chronicler of the Unsung and the Unconventional, Dies at 87," in The New York Times, May 25, 1996, p. 12.

In the following obituary, Severo provides an overview of Mitchell's career.

Joseph Mitchell, whose stories about ordinary people created extraordinary journalism in the pages of The New Yorker, died of cancer yesterday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in Manhattan.

At the height of his creative powers, from the 1930's to the mid-60's, Mr. Mitchell tended to avoid the standard fare of journalists: interviews with moguls, tycoons, movie stars and captains of industry. Instead, he pursued the generals of nuisance: flops, drunks, con artists, panhandlers, gin-mill owners and their bellicose bartenders, at least one flea circus operator, a man who sold racing cockroaches, a bearded lady and a fast talker who claimed to have written nine million words of "An Oral History of Our...