The Patron and the Panhandler: A Decades-Long Literary Mystery is Solved | Nerdy Needs | Scoop.it

Joe Gould’s Secret, Joe Mitchell’s classic portrait of an astute but deluded bohemian in postwar Greenwich Village, has been picked over for half a century by literary critics, fact-checkers, college professors, and ordinary readers. One abiding mystery has long been the identity of the anonymous heiress who kept the down-and-out Gould housed and fed throughout the late 1940s. That mystery has now been solved.