Joseph Mitchell

The author, Mitchell is a newspaper reporter and works at various times for several publications as beat reporter covering an array of topics. Mitchell talked at length about his work as a reporter during the Great Depression. He said that he'd spent a great deal of time working on stories about human misery because his editor believed that the human who was down on his luck wanted to read about others who were worse off. Toward that end, Mitchell spent time in places where people were having a rough time. He said that it sometimes bothered him to impose on the lives of those people. He said that he was often mistaken for a man with the public relief agency and he usually didn't try to explain otherwise. Mitchell found an array of unusual people with strange lives and backgrounds, ranging from the child prodigy to the...