[In the following essay, Jones briefly summarizes Mitchell's career, discussing his style, the subjects of his profiles, and his association with the New Yorker.]

One recent balmy summer afternoon, Joseph Mitchell stood in the middle of New York's Fulton Fish Market and grinned like a schoolboy playing hooky. "As soon as I came down here in the '30s as a reporter, I felt at home," he said. Over a half century later, he is still prowling the market's cobbled streets. "It's so exciting, with the colors, the smells, the noise as the background to all that trading," he said. "Most markets now are abstract. It's stocks and bonds. But this is the real thing that those old Dutch painters painted. I think of it as the Dutchness of New York. I like that aspect of it, even the old Dutch names of the streets. If you come down here at 5 a. m. and walk around, you can't help leaving exhilarated."

Now 84, Mitchell has been writing about the people and places around New York that exhilarated him for more than 60 years, first as a newspaper reporter and, since 1938, as a staff writer for The New Yorker. But, as he says, "the city changed on me," and a lot of what he loved has gone. "There's an old country saying—from the cradle to the hearse, things are never so bad that they can't get worse—well, that's the way I see the world." The fish market was one of his first loves and now is his last. He has come to think of it as a microcosm of the metropolis. "Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and godown to Fulton Fish Market," he wrote 40 years ago; today he still relies on it to repair his gloomy spirits.

Along with his New Yorker contemporaries A. J. Liebling, Lillian Ross and St. Clair McKelway, Mitchell transformed magazine writing in the '40s, '50s and '60s. When Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote were still in knee pants, John McPhee points out, "Joe Mitchell was there, writing very artistic material in factual writing." Originally collected in such nonfiction classics as McSorley's Wonderful Saloon and The Bottom of the Harbor, Mitchell's darkly comic articles are models of literary journalism. "Mitchell is a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter," said the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Among his most ardent fans are William Kennedy and Calvin Trillin, who dedicated his book Killings "To the New Yorker reporter who set the standard—Joseph Mitchell."

A notoriously slow writer, Mitchell has not published anything in 27 years. "I can't seem to get anything finished anymore," he says. "The hideous state the world is in just defeats the kind of writing I used to do." And because he refused to let his books be reprinted until recently, a generation of readers has grown up ignorant of Mitchell's art. But this month Pantheon is publishing Up in the Old Hotel, an omnibus of all Mitchell's New Yorker writing. Seen in its entirety, his work is an epic of big-city life that shifts between unsentimental celebrations of human gumption and strangely elegiac meditations on death and the burdens of time.

Mitchell's colleague Brendan Gill thinks the timing of the book is perfect. It is coming out "not only at the crown of [Joe's] life but at a time when everybody's speculating on the change at The New Yorker," Gill says, referring to the appointment of ex-Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown as editor—a move, say media-watchers, that spells the end of the old New Yorker. "Here's a kind of ideal summary of the intentions of The New Yorker in the work of one man. He was the model … the ideal."

The people in Mitchell's articles are tough old birds. There is Mazie P. Gordon, a blunt but kindly movie-theater ticket seller who looked after Bowery bums in the '30s. There is the bohemian barfly Joe Gould, "an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over 35 years." Though rarely happy, none of Mitchell's people is resigned to fate. They fight back, and their most common weapon is a mordant, earthy sense of the absurd that Mitchell has lately labeled "graveyard humor." He has immortalized gin mills (including the 138-year-old McSorley's, New York's oldest bar), a social club for deaf people, a terrapin farm near Savannah, Ga., and the rats on the New York waterfront. He has profiled everyone from calypso singers to the Mohawk Indians who helped build New York's skyscrapers to a man who ran something called Captain Charlie's Museum for Intelligent People.

Mitchell is plainly awed by many of his subjects. One piece begins, "A garrulous old Southerner, the Reverend Mr. James Jefferson DavisHall, is the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city." No matter how strange a person is, Mitchell's treatment is always delicately respectful. Of a bearded lady, he wrote, "Jane Barnell occasionally considers herself an outcast and feels that there is something vaguely shameful about the way she makes a living."

In an age when journalists have become stars who vie with their subjects for the spotlight, Mitchell is an anomaly. Private and self-effacing, he has for years politely turned down requests for interviews. "I always thought a reporter was supposed to ask the questions," he once said. For most of his life he has shuttled back and forth between New York and his family home in North Carolina. "Southerners feel like outsiders everywhere, even in the South sometimes, but when I go back I feel that I fit right in," he says. An avid naturalist, he is immersed in a reforestation project on the family farm.

The subjects who have intrigued him most—Gypsies, Indians, fishmongers—were members of clannish, hermetic worlds; by the late '40s he had begun to focus almost exclusively on the tightly knit denizens of the waterfront. The bustle of the trading and the community of ornery old men who hung around the market reminded him of the tobacco market in his hometown. "I didn't leave Fairmont," he says. "I found it up here in the fish market."

The prose of the fish-market stories is as graceful and unadorned as a Shaker chair, and its incantatory rhythms are as soothing as old hymns. "I read Ulysses in college and never got over it," says Mitchell of James Joyce, and the fish-market tales teem with images of death and regeneration. "In recent years, I have written mostly about what I guess could be called the unusual in the usual, such as a description of the bottom of the New York harbor, in which, without seeming to, I tried to make the reader conscious of parallels between the litter and the marine life down there—the wrecks and the eels and the polluted oyster beds—and the beauty and the ugliness stored up in his own mind," he once wrote. His accounts of an old seaman's hotel, rats and plague, the deep-sea fishermen of Connecticut and the shad fishermen of New Jersey are like what Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism.

Mitchell still goes into the office every day he is in New York and writes. Much of what he's at work on is about the fish market—and he's sanguine about his chances of completing the stories. "I'm on firmer ground … because I came out and said that graveyard humor is the way I look at the world … In these things [pieces], I'm just going to say the future of the world looks horrible to me. I don't want to be gloomy, but that business about the cradle and the hearse just explains what I'm doing."