Joe Gould’s Teeth

Joe Gould (1889-1957) was an eccentric who for years claimed to be writing a minutely detailed oral history that numbered in the millions of words. He was the subject of two famous essays by the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell — the first in 1942 (an adulatory profile) and the second in 1964 (when Mitchell deemed Gould to be a fraud, and his work of history nonexistent). In Joe Gould's Teeth, Jill Lepore investigates the truth surrounding Gould, and comes to the view that he was a troubled and possibly autistic individual who suffered (if that is the right word) from hypergraphia — i.e., “he could not stop writing.” This is a minor but charming profile of a complicated man.