SOURCE: "Mitchell's Wonderful McSorley," in The Nation, Vol. 157, No. 7, August 14, 1943, p. 190.

In the following essay, Mellquist likens the sketches and stories in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon to genre paintings.

Genre paintings resemble feature stories. They take a mellow, or raffish, or appetizing area of life and memorialize it by the affection they have for their subject. Too often, unfortunately, they remain ephemeral, registering but a moment of warmth. But John Sloan's painting of McSorley's, an old bar on East Seventh Street, in New York, is still remembered. And other painters, though somewhat less impressively, have also inscribed their affection for the place. Now Joseph Mitchell, ex-newspaperman who contributes special features to the New Yorker, has assembled twenty of these pieces and put them in a book with the title of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.

He begins with McSorley's, recounting its sawdust career under four changes of management in the last...