My Ears Are Bent

by: Joseph Mitchell

Published by: Vintage Books

Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College

Drunks, cheesecake, Jesus, sports, work, poverty—these topics were the early obsessions of one of the best feature writers to walk the streets of New York City.

After eleven years as a reporter for three New York newspapers, Joseph Mitchell shifted to The New Yorker. He once called his early newspaper writing “a different kind of writing,” but even if the articles collected in My Ears Are Bent serve as records of his apprenticeship, they still are an impressive and interesting set of feature stories.

All of these articles were written between 1929 and 1938, but the characteristics of Mitchell’s later writing—painstaking attention to facts and visual details, immersion reporting/observation, humor, and a compassionate liking for the oddballs, the poor, and the fringe radicals—are all present.

Mitchell enjoyed moving past New York’s businessmen and politicians and showing his readers some characters from the vast array of humanity that always populates a great city.

He let his interview subjects talk, while he listened. One scene in which he encounters a young woman with an idea for a “reverse striptease” is vintage Mitchell: “”˜Now look,’ she said, unnecessarily. ”˜This is the way I start my act.’” The word unnecessarily is an example of how he could blend dry humor and efficiency in ways that few writers are disciplined enough to manage.

The Chicago Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli reminds us that Mitchell’s interviews are “not verbatim—of course . . . Mitchell was a reporter before tape recorders. But it’s not fiction either.” Mitchell’s genius as a reporter was his ability to find interesting people that his readers almost certainly never would meet and to share with us detailed portraits that forced our recognition of our common humanity. Borrelli calls Mitchell “the reporter’s reporter, the finest The New Yorker ever produced (then and now, and possibly forever).”

Readers of contemporary journalism, New Journalism, and creative nonfiction will enjoy many of the articles in this book, and in fact, My Ears Are Bent is a reminder of just how old many tactics of good writing really are.

Armchair Interviews says: This book is well worth your time.