Writer Who Set Reporting Standards, New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, Dies

Joseph Mitchell, whose stories about ordinary people created extraordinary journalism in the pages of The New Yorker, died of cancer Friday at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 87.

At the height of his creative powers, from the 1930s to the mid-‘60s, Mitchell tended to avoid the standard fare of journalists: interviews with moguls, tycoons, movie stars and captains of industry.

Instead, he pursued the generals of nuisance: flops, drunks, con artists, panhandlers, gin-mill owners and their bellicose bartenders, at least one flea circus operator, a man who sold racing cockroaches, and a bearded lady.

For him, people were always as big as their dreams, as mellow as the ale they nursed in the shadows of McSorley’s saloon off Cooper Square in the East Village.

He wrote during a time when New Yorkers were mostly convinced that they were of good heart and that they had the best of intentions, whatever the rest of the world thought of their abrasivness and contentiousness. Mitchell’s articles offered evidence that they were right.

When somebody suggested that he wrote about the “little people,” he replied that there were no little people in his work. “They are as big as you are, whoever you are,” he said.

Mitchell arrived at the New Yorker in 1938 when the magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, was giving its top nonfiction writers, among them St. Clair McKelway, A.J. Liebling and Philip Hamburger, more space and time than was available to reporters of the day. The New Yorker writers used their good fortune to advantage.

Mitchell helped to pioneer a special kind of reportage, setting standards to which later generations of reporters would aspire.

If his name is not as widely known as it might have been, that is mostly because for the last three decades of his life, he wrote nary a word that anybody got to see. For years, he would show up at his tiny office at The New Yorker every day and assure his colleagues that he was working on something, but that it was not quite ready.

“I’m a ghost; everything’s changed now,” Mitchell said when he was in his 80s, adding that he had become used to being obscure.

Although Mitchell always had an extraordinary reputation among nonfiction writers and his out-of-print books were eagerly sought by collectors, he emerged from his obscurity in 1992 when the body of his work was reissued by Pantheon Books in a volume called “Up in the Old Hotel.”

The book was a critical and commercial success, and Mitchell said he was pleased to learn that younger readers found merit in his prose.

The centerpiece was a series of articles that appeared in The New Yorker in the late 1930s and ‘40s.

Joseph Mitchell was born July 27, 1908, on a farm near Iona, N.C.