@book {356301,
	title = {Joe Gould{\textquoteright}s Teeth},
	year = {2016},
	publisher = {Knopf},
	organization = {Knopf},
	address = {New York},
	abstract = {From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called {\textquotedblleft}The Oral History of Our Time.{\textquotedblright}
Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life{\textquoteright}s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly anything anyone ever said to him. {\textquotedblleft}I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,{\textquotedblright} he explained, because {\textquotedblleft}as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.{\textquotedblright} By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould{\textquoteright}s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in {\textquotedblleft}Joe Gould{\textquoteright}s Secret,{\textquotedblright} a second profile, Mitchell claimed that {\textquotedblleft}The Oral History of Our Time{\textquotedblright} had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould{\textquoteright}s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, set about to find out.
Joe Gould{\textquoteright}s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that {\textquotedblleft}The Oral History of Our Time{\textquotedblright} did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould{\textquoteright}s own diaries and notebooks{\textemdash}including volumes of his lost manuscript{\textemdash}Lepore argues that Joe Gould{\textquoteright}s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists{\textquoteright} relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould{\textquoteright}s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling, and ferocious.
{\textquotedblleft}A madman{\textquoteright}s grossly engrossing tale.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}The New York Times
{\textquotedblleft}Revelatory..{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}San Francisco Chronicle\&nbsp;{\textquotedblleft}We owe Lepore a debt of gratitude for re-introducing us to one of the strangest strangers to have ever walked among us.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}Chicago Tribune
{\textquotedblleft}Lepore specializes in excavating old flashpoints{\textemdash}forgotten or badly misremembered collisions between politics and cultural debates in America{\textquoteright}s past. She lays out for our modern sensibility how some event or social problem was fought over by interest groups, reformers, opportunists and {\textquoteleft}thought leaders{\textquoteright} of the day. The result can look both familiar and disturbing, like our era{\textquoteright}s arguments flipped in a funhouse mirror{\textellipsis}.Her discipline is worthy of a first-class detective.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}The New York Review of Books
{\textquotedblleft}At a time when few are disposed to see history as a branch of literature, Lepore occupies a prominent place in American letters.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}The Daily Beast
{\textquotedblleft}Again and again, she distills the figures she writes about into clean, simple, muscular prose, making unequivocal assertions that carry a faint electric charge{\textellipsis}[and] attain a transgressive, downright badass swagger.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}Slate
{\textquotedblleft}Lepore{\textquoteright}s superb narrative brings that history vividly into the present, weaving individual lives into the sweeping changes of the century.{\textquotedblright} {\textemdash}The Wall Street Journal},
	url = {http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/536161/joe-goulds-teeth/},
	author = {Lepore, Jill}
}
