It is a daily paper, but owing to some peculiarity in the delivery of second-class mail in New York City it arrives at my apartment house every third or fourth day in batches of two or three or four issues, each issue tightly rolled and tightly wrapped in a brown-paper wrapper, and when I open my mailbox and find a batch waiting for me I am almost as glad to see it as I was during my first year or so in the city, when every now and then something I saw or heard or tasted or smelled or touched would remind me sometimes unaccountably of something at home and I would have a spasm of homesickness so sudden and so startlingly painful that I would have trouble breathing and would feel as if my insides were caving in and would have to take a deep breath and keep on taking deep breaths until I got over it.

At The New Yorker, there’s an excerpt from Joseph Mitchell’s uncompleted memoir.

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