A Previously Unpublished Essay by the Legendary New York Mystery, Joe Gould: “Why I Write”

Aaron Gilbreath
4 min readJan 4, 2020

Below is a previously unpublished essay written in 1934 by one of the most legendary figures in American letters: Joe Gould. New Yorker writer Jill Lepore unearthed it while researching her 2016 book Joe Gould’s Teeth. It’s an incredible book. After I spotted the essay in Lepore’s bibliography, I got a copy from Columbia University’s…

Aaron Gilbreath

Essayist, Journalist, Burritoist. Longreads Editor. Writing: Harper’s, NYT, Slate, Paris Review, VQR, Oxford American, Kenyon Review. 3 nonfiction books.