And what I ended up walking away from the project wishing was that Gould hadn't basically been complicit in destroying what we could possibly know about Augusta Savage and that Savage herself hadn't been so haunted by Gould that she hadn't done the willful act that she did, which was apparently to have destroyed many of her papers and much of her art. She had been the obsession of Joe Gould since 1923, when he first met her at a poetry reading. In any case, I eventually found out it was a woman - Augusta Savage - who at the time was the most prominent artist in Harlem and one of the most influential still, because she was a teacher of art. And so it soon became clear to me that he was possibly dangerous to other people, not just to Joseph Mitchell, who I think he harmed in many ways as well. I had become uncomfortable spending time with Joe Gould because his insanity was a little terrifying. And I went on this kind of endless, crazy search because I really believed what Gould believed - or said he believed - which is that the stories of ordinary people really matter. So I ended up trying to retrace Gould's footsteps and follow him through his life, and then trying to retrace Mitchell's footsteps. And this is sort of like Joe Gould's curse - Mitchell had become obsessed, too. Like, maybe there is this 9-million-word manuscript somewhere.

I thought: Well, if all this is wrong, then maybe The Oral History really exists. On what she discovered from Gould's student files at HarvardĮverything in them belied pretty much everything in either of Mitchell's profiles, so then I was sort of stuck. In her new book, Joe Gould's Teeth, Lepore sets out to answer the question once and for all: Did Gould write his Oral History? Lepore is the latest writer to become fascinated by Gould, and here's why: In 1964, Mitchell wrote about Gould again, and this time he concluded that Gould's Oral History never existed. And what he meant by that was he thought history shouldn't be the story of celebrities and kings and queens and presidents and generals, but should be the story of ordinary people - the 'small fry,' he liked to call them.'

'And actually, the term oral history comes from Gould,' New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore tells NPR's Kelly McEvers. Gould said he was writing the longest book ever he called it The Oral History of Our Time. Mitchell first introduced Gould in 1942: He was a quirky, possibly mentally ill Harvard dropout who wandered the streets of Greenwich Village and Harlem filling pages and pages of dime-store notebooks with everything people said to him. In two of The New Yorker's most famous articles, writer Joseph Mitchell tried to answer one question: Who was Joe Gould? Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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