left Mitchell isolated and listless for much of his life. He lived in an era of psychology that focused purely on anxiety, and doctors regarded depression as a severe side effect of existing anxiety. However, symptoms of this condition did not clearly manifest in his life until late in his career. Many of Mitchell's coworkers, as well as his biographer, Thomas Kunkel, tell of the toll the subjects of his works had on him, specifically his greatest subject, Joe Gould. Mitchell once remarked to Washington Post writer David Streitfeld, "You pick someone so close that, in fact, you are writing about yourself. Joe Gould had to leave home because he didn't fit in, the same way I had to leave home because I didn't fit in. Talking to Joe Gould all those years he became me in a way, if you see what I mean." Even with Joe Gould as a way to explore his own reality, Mitchell began to attract characters with similar attributes. In a feature within The New Yorker magazine, Charles McGrath notes that "the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman first pointed out that the people Mitchell wrote about more and more resembled himself: loners, depressives, nostalgists, haunters of the waterfront, cherishers of arcane information. The characters in his pieces began to share a similar voice; they all sounded a little like Mitchell." From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything further. Although he struggled to publish, he did write hundreds of pages of manuscripts for several pieces, including his own memoir, which Thomas Kunkel used extensively in writing Mitchell's biography. After he died, his colleague Roger Angell wrote:Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.While