"Chronicler of the unusual and the original," as the New York Times put it, Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908 and arrived in New York in 1929, the day after the stock market crash. Since 1938 he was on the staff of The New Yorker, the magazine from which several of the best journalists and writers in the United States emerged. Mitchell specialized in the literary portrait, what he called "profiles," of New York's most diverse characters: from Broadway stars to dubious magnates, from circus tamers to poets and painters. When someone once reproached him for writing about "ordinary people," he replied (and the phrase became famous): "ordinary people are as important as you, whoever you are." He was also in love with the port of New York, on which he left memorable pages, as well as in general about the architecture of the city. Although little known outside his country, Joseph Mitchell is considered one of the indispensable masters of the journalistic and literary style in which several generations of American writers were trained. He died in Manhattan in 1996 at the age of eighty-seven.