Joe Gould (writer)

He inspired the book Joe Gould's Secret (1965) by Joseph Mitchell, and its film adaptation (2000), and is a character in the 2009 computer game The Blackwell Convergence.

Two months after his departure from Harvard, he embarked on a five-hundred-mile walking trip to Canada, exploring its landscape, and then came back to Boston.

Gould wrote again to Harvard, asking to be allowed to make up his outstanding credits by taking the examination in a class taught by the anthropologist Earnest Hooton.

His artistic friends, most notably Sarah Berman, wrote stories and harangued editors about him to try to help him, but Gould's condition worsened, and he went in and out of psychiatric hospitals for many years.

Gould collapsed on the street in 1952, eventually ending up in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, where he died in 1957, aged 67.

Time ran an obituary for him: "Gould had no known relatives but many friends, including poet E. E. Cummings, artist Don Freeman, Writers Malcolm Cowley and William Saroyan."

"[3] Edward J. O'Brien, the editor of Best American Short Stories and a Harvard classmate of Gould's, testified that, "Mr. Ezra Pound and I once saw a fragment of it running to perhaps 40,000 words," and deemed it to have "considerable psychological and historical importance."

In the October, 1923 issue of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, Malcolm Cowley and Slater Brown covered Joe Gould.

[4] The poet Marianne Moore, as editor of The Dial, published in the April, 1929 issue, under the heading "From Joe Gould's Oral History", the two chapters "Marriage" and "Civilization".

Upon the publication of Mitchell's "Joe Gould's Secret," in September, 1964, people began to write to him and send him notebook copies of the Oral History.

PM news photographer Ray Platnick photographed for a feature on Greenwich Village poets, including Gould along with Diana Barrett Moulton and Maxwell Bodenheim in eccentric poses in front of their verses scrawled on the walls of the Village Arts Center at 1 Charles St.[7] Gould claimed to understand the behavior and language of seagulls, saying that he had translated the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into their language.

He made two brief appearances in And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, co-authored by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, set in 1944, but finally published in 2008.