Joe Gould's Secret

It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History - the longest book ever written he claimed, formed of recorded conversations set down in exercise books, to be published after his death. Of course, when his death came, the great epic was nowhere to be found. Joseph Mitchell's profile of Gould caused a major sensation on first publication but his association with Gould ricocheted destructively in Mitchell's own life. This compelling portrait of a true New York eccentric, a man who embodied the disconnected, delusional nature of real life, was a personal enquiry into the agony of writer's block.