Joe Gould's Teeth

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the missing longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called "The Oral History of Our Time."

Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that "The Oral History of Our Time" did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould's own diaries and notebooks--including volumes of his lost manuscript--Lepore argues that Joe Gould's real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists' relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould'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.

Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04/18/2017
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.30w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781101971796
ISBN10: 1101971797
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures
- History | United States | 20th Century
- History | Historiography

About the Author
JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include the New York Times best seller The Secret History of Wonder Woman and Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.