Joe Gould’s Teeth

"Joe Gould, an eccentric Greenwich Village fixture who claimed for decades to be writing a monumental “Oral History of Our Time,” achieved immortality through Joseph Mitchell’s beloved New Yorker profiles, “Professor Sea Gull” and “ Joe Gould’s Secret.” More than half a century after Gould’s death, Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and New Yorker writer, questions Mitchell’s fact-finding and addresses trenchant issues about race, mental illness and journalistic versus historical standards in this breezy, compulsively readable inquiry. The result, more than just a footnote to a beloved literary landmark, has bite."