SOURCE: "Historian of Queer—Not 'Little'—People," in New York Tribune Weekly Book Review, Vol. 19, No. 49, August 1, 1943, p. 5.

In the following review of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Walker ranks Mitchell as the best writer in his field, which Walker labels "low-life biography."

Joseph Mitchell is pretty generally accepted as the ablest practitioner of low-life biography, a field in which many talented writers have operated over the last few years. It has been said that he "must be about the best interviewer in the world," which may be true, although "interviewer" is not precisely the word. He is psychographer, historian and an extraordinarily acute observer of what some folk would call trivial. Whatever he is, there is little doubt that at the moment he is the Old Master of his particular type of stuff, which in his hands comes very near to being literature of a high order.

The sketches...