Tag Archives: joe gould

I don’t think that Joseph Mitchell’s writing style is outdated or old fashioned. He has a very descriptive writing style that allows the reader to create an image of how Gould looked and how he went about his life. Considering the unusual life of Joe Gould and the story telling style of Mitchell, it feels like one is reading a fictional story. His two pieces on Joe Gould are definitely feature articles. These two profiles on Gould, are good examples that aspiring feature writers can go by.

The second piece on Gould introduces him in a more negative light. Mitchell used sentences like “Gould looked like a bum and lived like a bum.” “He was generally pretty dirty.” “His voice was distractingly nasal. On occasion, he stole.”I feel that Mitchell chose to portray Gould as a bum and not as a literary genius the second time around because he wanted to make it believable when readers found out that his Oral History was a lie.

Reading the first profile, I was skeptical about the Oral History. What made it hard for me to believe was its supposed length. “It is already eleven times as long as the Bible.” This statement threw me off, because I am currently in the process of reading the whole Bible. It has been a couple of months and I am still not done. The Bible is a very long book and just to imagine a book eleven times its size seems unreal.