Joseph Mitchell Back in The New Yorker

This week’s edition of The New Yorker’s annual anniversary issue includes a never-before-published piece by Joseph Mitchell, one of the magazine’s most celebrated contributors.

The piece, titled “Street Life,” was given to the magazine by Thomas Kunkel, who’s writing a biography of Mitchell, who died in 1996. (“Genius in Disguise,” Mr. Kunkel’s biography of The New Yorker’s founder, Harold Ross, was published in 1995.) Mr. Kunkel, provided access to Mitchell’s papers, found three excerpts of what appears to be an uncompleted memoir.

Mitchell grew up in North Carolina, and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1938 until his death, though he didn’t publish anything in the magazine after “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964. Mitchell’s profiles of the city’s characters are legendary, and much of “Street Lfe” is an ode to traveling around his adopted home: “I frequently spend an entire day riding on New York City buses, getting off at junction points and changing from one line to another as the notion strikes me and gradually criss-crossing whatever part of the city I happen to be in. I might ride in a dozen or fifteen or twenty different buses during the day.”

“What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an interview. “There’s an ambition in the voice; the voice is becoming more Joycean. He’s looking outward, but all of these pieces are very interior. He’s at the center of it.”

Mr. Remnick said the magazine plans to publish the remaining two excerpts, at a time yet to be determined.