SOURCE: "Bowery Botanist," in Time, Vol. XLII, No. 5, August 2, 1943, pp. 98, 100.

In the following review of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, the critic describes the atmosphere of the bar and supplies thumbnail sketches of three of the people profiled in the book.

Joseph Mitchell is as gloomy as only a humorist can be. For years he has been studying, with the prying patience of a botanist, the queer human weeds he finds growing in the dingier interstices of Manhattan's bum-littered Bowery. But Mitchell is saddened when readers of The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines chuckle at the results of his researches, these 20 profiles and stories, now collected for the first time in book form [in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon]. For Humorist Mitchell professes to find nothing comic in his wacky human jujubes. He says he does not caricature them. Instead, he describes them with a loving exactness which gives them an...