Joe Gould's Secret (English)

Scion of an old Massachusetts family, graduate of Harvard University, Joe Gould was slated for medical school and a brilliant career as a surgeon and community leader, like his father and grandfather before him. Instead, in 1916, Gould came to New York City and spent the next 40 years living in poverty in Greenwich Village, panhandling and sleeping in flophouses or doorways. He told New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell that his only ambition was to walk around the city and write down the things he overheard people say. Obsessed with the idea that talk is history, and that even off-the-cuff remarks could be important and prophetic, Gould filled hundreds of notebooks that he called "An Oral History of Our Time." Mitchell wrote a piece about Gould for the New Yorker in 1942, and followed it up 22 years later, after Gould died, with another profile. These have been combined into JOE GOULD'S SECRET. The book was made into a movie in 2001, starring Ian Holm, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon. minimize