“Often what is hidden in Mitchell’s portraits of New York is a reflection of his life in North Carolina.”

One November day some years ago, at the midpoint of my obsession with legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, I drove two hours south from Durham, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to Fairmont, the little town in swamp country where Mitchell grew up. The roads off the highway ran for several miles along soybean fields and pine woods, abandoned farmhouses and country churches, until I arrived at Main Street—a quiet strip of low buildings, one of which had recently fallen, reduced to a pile of bricks in a vacant lot. A silence hovered over the shuttered storefronts, deserted streets, and derelict warehouses. I had come to see what Mitchell had seen, to understand how this place had shaped his vision, but the town he knew had long been lost, and there was little to suggest that one of the great writers of the twentieth century had been raised here. Bulldog Avenue, once home to a thriving tobacco market, was now a flat, empty field, and several headstones in a cemetery beside the First Baptist Church—where Mitchell used to find Easter eggs under dead leaves on his ancestors’ graves—had fallen face down in the grass. Doubtless I would have driven back in disappointment, having learned what Mitchell had already taught me—the past is irretrievable—had I not made plans to meet his nephew Joey, who lived in Fairmont and had become a kind of ambassador to travelers like me. “Every eight months or so,” Joey had told me on the phone, “someone calls about Uncle Joseph. You’re right on time.”