Madman or Brilliant Historian? Unraveling the True Story of Joe Gould

New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore embarked on a quest to uncover the true story of Joe Gould, an eccentric modernist writer and historian who suffered from mental illness but was admired by contemporary artists and intellectuals, including Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings. He was famously profiled by The New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell in 1942. In Joe Gould’s Teeth, Lepore tracks down Gould’s lost manuscript for what he called Oral History of Our Time, a historical account which he claimed was the longest book ever written.