Up in the old hotel, and other stories

A reporter at large for The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell specialized in wonderful profiles of eccentrics, bohemians, Bowery denizens and other colorful characters that populated the city of New York. Before the odd end to his writing career, Mitchell was one of the most prolific writers for the magazine, and Up in the Old Hotel includes just about everything Mitchell wrote for The New Yorker. After "Joe Gould's Secret," his most famous story, Mitchell suffered from one of the most famous cases of writer's block ever. After publishing that last story in The New Yorker in 1964, Mitchell continued to go to the office every day for the next thirty years but never produced another word for the magazine.