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Joe Gould's Teeth
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From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time."
Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that " ...more
Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that " ...more
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Paperback, 256 pages
Published
April 18th 2017
by Vintage
(first published May 17th 2016)
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New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell wrote highly popular pieces about New York City oddballs and eccentrics. Joe Gould was the subject of two profiles, one in 1942 and another in 1964. What made Gould interesting to Mitchell was his "The Oral History of Our Time," a mammoth project allegedly nine million words long. When Mitchell returned to Gould in the 60's, he ruled that the Oral History had never existed, and by that time Gould was dead and could not argue otherwise. After the story came out p
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Joe Gould's Teeth is a fascinating little novella-sized project from Harvard professor and New Yorker staffer Jill Lepore, which started life because of an earlier article from that same magazine -- an article in 1942, in fact, a character profile of an eccentric bohemian named Joe Gould who had been known ...more
Joe Gould's Teeth is a fascinating little novella-sized project from Harvard professor and New Yorker staffer Jill Lepore, which started life because of an earlier article from that same magazine -- an article in 1942, in fact, a character profile of an eccentric bohemian named Joe Gould who had been known ...more

May 18, 2016
Book Riot Community
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The story of Joe Gould is wildly interesting. He was an eccentric man, friends with famous artists, including Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He believed himself to be the most brilliant historian of his time, and he claimed to write down everything that was ever said to him, and boasted of having written a nine million word manuscript. Reporter Joseph Mitchell later claimed in a New Yorker article that the manuscript to be a figment of a madman’s imagination. Joe Gould’s Teeth is a fasc
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The whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking that this story would be better served as an article in The New Yorker. It fits naturally as follow-up to the first New Yorker articles that profiled Joe Gould's effort to write “The Oral History of Our Time.”So I wasn't surprised when I later learned that a version of this story was published in the July 27th, 2015 issue of The New Yorker. Unfortunately, there just isn't enough substance here to justify a book. The most frustrating aspect
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Joe Gould is famous as a New York City bohemian and eccentric of the mid-20th century. Sometimes he was homeless and sometimes he was hospitalized for various mental issues. But he was known for constantly writing a book--he considered himself a historian--written in hundreds of school composition books, some carried around with him, others stored in locations he kept to himself. Some parts he lost and apparently wrote over and over again. He called this the longest book ever written, An Oral Hi
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I started this book with great anticipation. I had read "Joe Gould's Secret" by Mitchell and had become fascinated by the story of this self-proclaimed "oral historian", who claimed to be writing a complete history of everything anybody had ever said. This type of grandiose undertaking is usually associated with psychopathology, and there were indeed plenty of indications in Mitchell's two New Yorker stories about Joe Gould that would indicate this was not your run-of-the-mill Greenwich Village
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1. Joe Mitchell was not a good person.
2. Joe Gould made me both love and hate him.
3. I'm very curious about what Gould would be diagnosed with today.
-Overall, so interesting. ...more
2. Joe Gould made me both love and hate him.
3. I'm very curious about what Gould would be diagnosed with today.
-Overall, so interesting. ...more

Skreeek! So goes the lore'd legend "Professor Seagull" Joe Gould as he struts his stuff around the pages of The New Yorker's mag/writer Joseph Mitchell's pieces on this wackier-than-life figure of the first half 20th century and, now too in JL's re-opening account of tracking down the facts, little though they be, yet sufficient to close the file for posterity of "The Oral History of Our Time."
Joe Gould was on to something, maybe a lot of little somethings accrued to his time before widespread ...more
Joe Gould was on to something, maybe a lot of little somethings accrued to his time before widespread ...more

Harvard historian and contributor to the New Yorker magazine Jill Lepore has written a dark and somewhat disturbing investigation into recent American cultural history. A major punchline of this investigation is that one should not always take what one reads in the New Yorker, especially about pop culture "icons", at face value. Making sense of this dilemma is what makes "Joe Gould's Teeth" such an interesting book.
Joe Gould was a street historian of sorts which lived in Greenwich Village from t ...more
Joe Gould was a street historian of sorts which lived in Greenwich Village from t ...more

The premise sounded so interesting yet the book was extremely boring. Ostensibly it's about some prolific writer that was supposedly recording an Oral History of the World (which was actually more his personal interactions with other people) that had run out to hundreds of thousands of pages. However, upon reading the book, it's about a certified insane individual that claims he's doing all this writing (and apparently hardly writes at all) who happens to somehow be friendly with some literary c
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A fascinating investigation into the life and work of a mentally unhinged historian likely afflicted with hypergraphia whose unrealized goal was to do for history what Whitman did for poetry.

I plowed through this, and because end notes are a pain in the butt to read while reading the main text, I later skimmed the notes to see what further information I could glean from them. This book is not just a sensational story about an oddball character-- I think you will find those reviews elsewhere without a problem--it is also a study of the historian's quest. Let me expand on that. Lepore makes a point to share with the reader the unusually rich supply of source materials she was able to
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I picked this up somewhat randomly at a random bookstore in Oregon during a recent visit. The cover captured my attention, and I recognized Lepore's name, as she wrote a book about Wonder Woman that I purchased as a gift a few years ago (I've always meant to read that one but have never gotten around to it). The jacket copy made it seem compelling -- here was this bizarre Modern-literature-adjacent figure I had never heard of, though I'm pretty familiar with that period in English literature. An
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Jill Lepore’s Joe Gould’s Teeth is that beautiful brand of history that reads less like a scholarly article and more like a detective report. Following the man better known as Professor Seagull, Lepore sets out to answer a question that has eluded the public since the notion of Gould’s “longest book in the world” arose. An eccentric Harvard alumnus and vagabond, Gould in the early 20th century claimed to have written the longest book on earth, an oral history attempting to capture ordinary life.
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Joe Gould was a man obsessed. In the 1930s and 40s, he wanted to record everything ever said in a collection called "The Oral History of Our Time." "Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore begins as Lepore's attempt to find the hundreds of notebooks rumored to contain the History. The History was never confirmed to have existed. "Shouldn't someone check?" Lepore asks.
Gould was made famous when New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell profiled Gould in the magazine in 1942. The Joe Gould paradox reminds me of a ...more
Gould was made famous when New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell profiled Gould in the magazine in 1942. The Joe Gould paradox reminds me of a ...more

If you view history as social forces, random encounters, unexpected outcomes and an account of human experience as a combination of behavior, what we tell ourselves about our behavior and why we do what we think we are doing--this book's for you. If you buy the idea history is the result of decisions made by great men, this book will present an opposing view. Good but not great. By the way, not until the epilogue is the book title explained.
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Sad. Make smee tink of the Jg's in my own life: Messrs. Quam and Appollo. A twisted brilliance gone to seed. Kindness required. Exasperation guaranteed. Yet why bother wit delusions if they cant be grand? JL wandered into a cul-de-sac, really, but got a good book out of it nonetheless. A sparkling sanity she has, which really comes down to finishing what you start. Plus there's the cutest pix on the inside flap, which is worth half a star at least. Tink I'll apply for a Guggie like Prof. Seagull
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Review Title: Long history short
Well, one thing can be said for certain about Joe Gould's teeth--Lepore tells his biography in a few short and small pages. I read the whole thing--150 small format pages plus footnotes--in a couple of hours. The history is longer than the biography.
The History in this case is Gould's "Oral History of the World", which was much written about, well documented in rumor, long awaited--but never published and possibly (probably?) never existed at all! Gould was a knoc ...more
Well, one thing can be said for certain about Joe Gould's teeth--Lepore tells his biography in a few short and small pages. I read the whole thing--150 small format pages plus footnotes--in a couple of hours. The history is longer than the biography.
The History in this case is Gould's "Oral History of the World", which was much written about, well documented in rumor, long awaited--but never published and possibly (probably?) never existed at all! Gould was a knoc ...more

Lepore tackles a difficult subject in this book: a thoroughly unlikeable man - racist, abusive, anti-Semitic, harasser of women - and his unfindable manuscript, simultaneously hailed as potentially one of the greatest works of history and dismissed as being unevenly written, where it was written at all. The book is being marketed as Lepore's search for the manuscript, but it's more about her can't-look-away curiosity for the man. She does an excellent job, I think, of treating Gould like a human
...more

Sep 04, 2016
Sue Smith
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
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Joe Gould’s Teeth is really just a research paper that’s been published into book form. It’s essentially thoughts and the tedious digging that you have to do in order to try and get information about an obscure personage or event that has dissolved into the historical fabric of time.
So who is Joe Gould?
The main interest behind Joe Gould is that he was developing an Oral History - writing down all the things seen and said by the commoners or people that weren’t historically significant but never ...more
So who is Joe Gould?
The main interest behind Joe Gould is that he was developing an Oral History - writing down all the things seen and said by the commoners or people that weren’t historically significant but never ...more

So this book, a much-expanded version of Lepore's New Yorker article, is right in my sweet spot. And I think it benefits from its brevity; I thought Lepore's book about Wonder Woman (for example) just couldn't bear the weight of its length. But this is a great and quick read, and I enjoyed literally every page.
There is one little thing that bothers me, though ... SPOILER ALERT ... It's not really the book I thought I was getting. It's really a short biography of Joe Gould, with goodly bits of J ...more
There is one little thing that bothers me, though ... SPOILER ALERT ... It's not really the book I thought I was getting. It's really a short biography of Joe Gould, with goodly bits of J ...more

Jun 24, 2016
Scotchneat
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I'm surprised I had never heard of Joe Gould - friend/pest to ee cummings, Ezra Pound, WC Williams... and the subject of 2 famous profiles by Joseph Mitchell in the New Yorker.
In life, Gould was a genius, a madman, a bohemian, a stalker, harmless, aggressive, racist, free thinking, a lech, generous. He was involved in Eugenics research. He walked across most of Canada.
As an adult, he was almost always poor and always focused on his life's work: An Oral History of Our Time. This work was suppose ...more
In life, Gould was a genius, a madman, a bohemian, a stalker, harmless, aggressive, racist, free thinking, a lech, generous. He was involved in Eugenics research. He walked across most of Canada.
As an adult, he was almost always poor and always focused on his life's work: An Oral History of Our Time. This work was suppose ...more
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Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson P ...more
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson P ...more
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