Joe Gould's Teeth

Joe Gould's Teeth
Author :
Publisher : Vintage
Total Pages : 257
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781101947593
ISBN-13 : 1101947594
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Joe Gould's Teeth by : Jill Lepore

Download or read book Joe Gould's Teeth written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.” Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life’s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. “I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,” he explained, because “as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.” By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould’s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a second profile, Mitchell claimed that “The Oral History of Our Time” had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould’s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out. Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.


Joe Gould's Teeth Related Books

Joe Gould's Teeth
Language: en
Pages: 257
Authors: Jill Lepore
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-05-17 - Publisher: Vintage

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written,
Joe Gould's Secret
Language: en
Pages: 110
Authors: Joseph Mitchell
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-01-26 - Publisher: Open Road Media

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of a notorious New York eccentric and the journalist who chronicled his life: “A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling” (Ian McEwan).
Joe Gould's Teeth
Language: en
Pages: 258
Authors: Jill Lepore
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-04-18 - Publisher: Vintage

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a
O Pioneers!
Language: en
Pages: 188
Authors: Willa Cather
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-07-15 - Publisher: Modernista

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When the young Swedish-descended Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm in Nebraska, she must transform the land from a wind-swept prairie landscape into
Prominent Families of New York
Language: en
Pages: 64
Authors: Lyman Horace Weeks
Categories: New York (N.Y.)
Type: BOOK - Published: 1898 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK