Some years ago, shortly after I first arrived in New York, I started making regular visits to the legendary Strand bookstore, in the East Village. There, amidst the tall, lean racks of books that seemed to stretch for miles, I sought out various dilapidated and dog-eared sorts of treasures. One day, I came across a faded copy of Joseph Mitchell’s “Old Mr. Flood” (1938). I hadn’t read much by Mitchell, and the book was a delightful surprise—a portrait of New York as seen through the eyes of the ninety-three-year-old seafood-loving Hugh G. Flood. I read it in one sitting and haven’t looked at my adopted city in quite the same way since then.

Mitchell was New York’s first true biographer; he paired a reporter’s precision with a novelist’s sense of narrative to create a series of intricate and revelatory profiles of the city in The New Yorker. An excavator of lost souls and eccentric visionaries, his genius lay partly in a natural ability to connect with those living on the margins of society. (A 1943 Times review of his work was wryly titled “Nostalgic Portraits of the Lunatic Fringe.”) He was a staff writer for the magazine for nearly thirty years and then spent another thirty coming into the office each day but failing to publish a single word. The mystery behind this blockage has nearly eclipsed Mitchell’s astounding literary legacy.

“Street Life,” an excerpt from an unpublished memoir by Mitchell, which ran in our Anniversary Issue, reveals that he actually was writing quite a bit during his so-called “period of silence.” (At the New Yorker’s recent Big Story panel, “Reimagining Joseph Mitchell’s New York,” the writer Thomas Kunkel revealed that this excerpt is one of three that he discovered while poring through Mitchell’s papers for a future biography project. The magazine plans to publish the other two excerpts in forthcoming issues.) The piece also brings to light other aspects of Mitchell’s work that haven’t been explored as fully until now, including his fascination with cathedrals, and his lifelong habit of walking the city’s neighborhoods and streets. Old buildings with their faded and crumbling exteriors intrigued and haunted him; he was drawn to these totems of the past in the same way that he was drawn to the oystermen down at the Fulton Fish Market or the faithful habituées of McSorely’s saloon. Like the buildings he venerated, the misfits and eccentrics populating Mitchell’s pieces had also persevered—if not quite triumphed—over profound changes taking place in the city.

Outsiders and street characters may have appealed to Mitchell because he felt like an outsider himself. He grew up in a small town in North Carolina, the son of a prosperous farmer who disapproved of his son’s chosen vocation. (“Son,” his father once asked, “is that the best that you can do, sticking your nose into other people’s business?”) As a child, Mitchell was fascinated by Biblical stories about people who, for whatever transgression or sin, had been cast out of society. This attraction to society’s outcasts would follow him to New York, but it was his hometown of Fairmont that he later credited with instilling in him an abiding appreciation for unusual characters. He once told an interviewer that he had been influenced by a pair of elderly aunts who liked to tell “horrifyingly funny” stories and take him on childhood visits to graveyards.

When he arrived in New York in 1929, at the age of twenty-one, Mitchell began working the crime beat at the New York Herald Tribune and the Morning World, patiently exploring the streets and neighborhoods—Harlem, the Bowery, the Fulton Fish Market—which would later serve as settings for so many of his pieces. His journalistic output was prodigious, often surpassing three pieces a week. (Much of his work from this period was published in the 1938 collection “My Ears are Bent,” which was reissued in 2008 by Vintage.)

In 1938, Mitchell joined the staff of The New Yorker, arriving at a time when the magazine’s nonfiction pieces were undergoing an expansion in length and literary nuance. The gifted reporter St. Clair McKelway, who was then the magazine’s managing editor, persuaded Mitchell to come to the magazine by promising him a salary rather than the usual drawing account (an account that allowed writers to spend money against the publication of future pieces) that most reporters at the magazine had at the time. His first big piece after joining the magazine was a Reporter at Large about a former ship captain who founded a private museum in midtown called the Museum for Intelligent People. Mitchell contributed over sixty pieces, many of them Profiles and long features, to the magazine between the mid-thirties and mid-sixties. He composed city narratives exploring the lives of gypsies and saloon owners, Bowery preachers and oystermen. Editor Harold Ross sometimes referred to his pieces, which tended to defy easy classification, as “highlife lowlife” stories. A “listener of genius,” as the Times once called him, Mitchell made an art out of detailing his subjects’ magical, wandering commentary. “If you were speaking with him,” Roger Angell told me, “he was quite charming. He would listen intently, nod his head in agreement with you, and then he would say in a light North Carolina drawl, ‘Ah know it!’” The only people he didn’t care to listen to, Mitchell once remarked, were “society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors, and any actress under the age of thirty-five.” He developed a close friendship with his colleague A. J. Liebling, and they would often lunch together with S. J. Perelman and James Thurber. Beginning in the fifties, he also struck up an occasional correspondence with Ernest Hemingway, after they found common cause over their mutual indignation at the public shaming of Ingrid Bergman when she had affair with Roberto Rosselini.

Like the novels of his idol, James Joyce, Mitchell’s writing depicts a city that is tied inextricably to its past. The fabled McSorley’s saloon, as Mitchell described it, is “stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully,” and inhabited by a “rapidly thinning” group of old Irish men who’ve been drinking there since their youth. The floorboards are warped and there’s no waiter, yet many of the patrons prefer the bar to their own homes. It’s “a drowsy place,” where “bartenders never make a needless move,” and the multiple clocks on the wall “have not been in agreement for many years.” There’s a pervasive nostalgia in almost all of Mitchell’s pieces, a fondness for an era—or a way of life—that’s rapidly slipping away. Mitchell’s Profile of the octogenarian Hugh G. Flood (which he later admitted was a composite of several old men who used to hang out around the Fulton Fish Market) offers a poignant, yet wildly humorous, look at a man who, while devouring oysters and downing scotch, fears that he’s frittering his life away: