Joe Gould's Secret, 1996 (Modern Library Series)

Joseph Ferdinand Gould--better known as Joe Gould--was a member of one of the oldest families in Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, and his parents took it for granted that he would go on to medical school and become a surgeon and a distinguished civic leader, as many of his ancestors, including his father and grandfather, had been. Instead, in 1916, in his middle twenties, he abruptly broke with his background and came to New York City and spent the next forty years living from hand to mouth in Greenwich Village as a kind of half outcast, half bohemian hero. He panhandled in Village hangouts, wore cast-off clothes, slept in flophouses or doorways, and often went hungry for days at a time. He said that he lived this way so that he could wander around the city at will, listening to people, and writing down some of the astonishing things he heard them say. He had become obsessed with the idea that talk is history and that even offhand remarks may have an eerie and prophetic historical import. He wrote in dime-store composition books, filling hundreds of them, and said that these books, when eventually joined together, would become an enormous book (a(continued on back flap)