Joe Gould's Teeth

Joe Gould's Teeth

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called â€œThe Oral History of Our Time.â€

Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his lifeâ€™s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. â€œI am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,â€ he explained, because â€œas a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.â€ By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gouldâ€™s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in â€œJoe Gouldâ€™s Secret,â€ a second profile, Mitchell claimed that â€œThe Oral History of Our Timeâ€ had been, all along, merely a figment of Gouldâ€™s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out. Â

Joe Gouldâ€™s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that â€œThe Oral History of Our Timeâ€ did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gouldâ€™s own diaries and notebooksâ€”including volumes of his lost manuscriptâ€”Lepore argues that Joe Gouldâ€™s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernistsâ€™ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gouldâ€™s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-05-17
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Vintage
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-05-17
Format	Kindle eBook

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