Pages 56 - 105 Summary and Analysis

In "Professor Sea Gull," the author described Joe Gould, a "notable" in Greenwich Village. Joe's father and grandfather were both doctors and his mother required that he attend college. To satisfy her, he attended Harvard as his father had done, but refused to go on for more formal education. He is different from most people in that he refused to have possessions. He said that he would be owned by a large money-making corporation and that he would refuse if the owner of the Chrysler Building offered him that property. Joe was almost constantly writing a work he called "An Oral History of Our Time." This was a rambling narrative of the interesting people Joe met and was written in longhand in twenty-seven notebooks. Joe had arranged to leave his manuscript to the Harvard Library and the Smithsonian and...