[In the following essay, Mellquist likens the sketches and stories in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon to genre paintings.]

Genre paintings resemble feature stories. They take a mellow, or raffish, or appetizing area of life and memorialize it by the affection they have for their subject. Too often, unfortunately, they remain ephemeral, registering but a moment of warmth. But John Sloan's painting of McSorley's, an old bar on East Seventh Street, in New York, is still remembered. And other painters, though somewhat less impressively, have also inscribed their affection for the place. Now Joseph Mitchell, ex-newspaperman who contributes special features to the New Yorker, has assembled twenty of these pieces and put them in a book with the title of McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.

He begins with McSorley's, recounting its sawdust career under four changes of management in the last eighty-nine years. Then he ambles over to the Bowery, where he describes Mazie, the brassy blonde who presides at the ticket window of the "bums'" favorite movie palace. He inspects gypsies and museum-keepers; glorifies Joe Gould, the Greenwich Village eccentric who has translated several of Longfellow's poems into Seagull; chats with Madame Olga, the Bearded Lady, and laments the lapse into respectability of a once boisterous gin mill. He sympathizes with old scrubbers from the skyscrapers and with cave-dwellers from Central Park. He finds a drinking reformer and a Times Square "sport" who arranges a yearly benefit ball for himself.

In the second section of his book, Mr. Mitchell celebrates beefsteak fests, clam-diggers, and terrapin-raisers; in a third hesuggests potentialities as a short-story writer (in "Goodbye, Shirley Temple" and in "On the Wagon"), while in the last he delineates both joys and depredations in his home community near the Little Pee Dee River, in North Carolina. For the most part he remains objective, assembling facts, measuring, limiting himself to exact data. This gives one the sense of an honest camera shot, deliberate but unmoving. Sometimes he chides city inhabitants for their lack of gumption, and then he seems to editorialize. At best, he touches some subterranean chord which puts us en rapport with the metropolitan community. Old McSorley—father and then son—draws the taps and eyes the aging men who harbor in the creaking chairs. Mazie, locking her wicket, paces the darker reaches of the Bowery, seeking the wastrels who might otherwise perish in the night. These moments are cherishable, and they give us something that O'Henry, in many ways the predecessor of Mitchell, could not convey.

This is the sympathetic penetration of life. Sloan had it in McSorley's, and certainly in his early etchings. The more smoldering George Luks—surely an American genre painter if there ever was one—all but entered the very marrow of his subjects. True, the density and the richness are not attained to the same degree as in the Dutch, such as Van Ostade, or the demoniac Jan Steen. But new affiliations have been made between man and his fellows. And in this sense, Joseph Mitchell, who is at all times a scrupulous and attentive writer, has contributed something comparable to the best of our twentieth-century genre painters.