Joe Gould's Secret is a 1965 book by Joseph Mitchell, based upon his two New Yorker profiles, "Professor Seagull", (1942) and "Joe Gould's Secret", (1964). Mitchell's work details the true story of the eponymous Joe Gould, a writer who lived on the streets of Greenwich Village in the first half of the 20th century. He was an eccentric, bridging the gap between bohemianism and the beat generation, though he was an outspoken critic of both. This criticism alienated him from the social circles of poets, authors, and artists of his time, and instead he focused on documenting the history of what he called the "shirt-sleeved multitude."
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“I do wish that as long as they are translating the thing, they would go right on ahead, while they’re at it, and translate Fedor Vasilyevich Protosov and Georgei Dmitrievich Abreskov and Ivan Petrovich Alexandrov into Joe and Harry and Fred.”
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“Science is an integral part of culture. It’s not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It’s one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.”
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