his battle with mental illness continued in the workplace, he was known by his family as a dependable and caring father and husband at home. Therese Jacobson and their children, Nora and Elizabeth, retained nothing but fond memories of their father, even though they knew he was struggling in his career. Death In 1995, Mitchell was diagnosed with lung cancer after he began experiencing back pain. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized in his brain. On May 24, 1996, Mitchell died at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 87. He was laid to rest in Floyd Memorial Cemetery in his hometown of Fairmont, North Carolina next to his wife. On his gravestone his daughters inscribed a quote from Shakespeare's seventy-third sonnet, one of his favorite lines in literature: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." Further reading For more information on Mitchell's biography and daily life, see Thomas Kunkel's Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015). Career Mitchell came to New York City in 1929, at the age of 21, with the ambition of becoming a political reporter. He worked for such newspapers as The World, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World-Telegram, at first covering crime and then doing interviews, profiles, and character sketches. In 1931, he took a break from journalism to work on a freighter that sailed to Leningrad and brought back pulp logs to New York City. He returned to journalism later that year and continued to write for New York newspapers until he was hired by St. Clair McKelway at The New Yorker in 1938. He remained with the magazine until his death in 1996. His book Up in the Old Hotel collects the best of his writing for The New Yorker, and his earlier book My Ears Are Bent collects the best of his early journalistic writing, which he omitted from Up in the Old Hotel. Mitchell's last book was his empathetic account of the Greenwich Village street character and self-proclaimed historian Joe Gould's extravagantly disguised case of writer's block, published as Joe Gould's Secret (1964). Mitchell served on the board of directors of the Gypsy Lore Society, was one of the founders of the South Street Seaport Museum, was involved with the Friends of Cast-Iron Architecture, and served five years on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In August 1937, he