By observing the lives of those around him and recording the goings-on, Gould set about compiling an exhaustive record of modern life he called the "Oral History." He claimed that oral history held more truth than the formalized history of textbooks and professors, as it gave voices to the lower classes that were representative of true humanity.[1] In the 1920s, Gould had small portions of his "Oral History" published in magazines, but in the years that followed he became more secretive and eccentric. He was well known among the local shopkeepers, artists, and restaurateurs, many of whom gave him handouts of money or food in support of his project.
Mitchell met Gould in 1942 and wrote the profile "Professor Sea Gull" on him for The New Yorker. The first part of Joe Gould's Secret is made up of this profile, covering the period from Gould's graduation from Harvard University in 1911, leading up to the writing of his "Oral History", said to be composed of 20,000 conversations and 9,000,000 words. The second part of the book is a more personal memoir of Mitchell's experiences with Gould, their eventual falling out, and his discovery of Joe Gould's secret: that the "Oral History" did not exist.
Gould suffered from writer's block and hypergraphia; while to those around him he appeared to be taking constant notes—a notion he was happy to reinforce—he was, in fact, re-writing the same few chapters dealing with seemingly trivial events in his own early life. He had filled countless notebooks with edited versions of these events, evidently searching for meaning in the revisions.[1] Out of respect, Mitchell waited several years after Gould's death to reveal the secret. He wrote the second article in 1964, and combined it with the original article in book form in 1965. Mitchell's pieces on Gould were later collected along with many of his other prominent works in the volume Up in the Old Hotel, published in 1992.
