Joe Gould's Secret Signed First Edition Reference

Joe Gould’s Secret (Viking, 1965) is Mitchell’s final published work — a two-part narrative that begins as a profile of Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village bohemian who claimed to be writing an enormous “Oral History of Our Time,” and ends as a meditation on obsession, failure, and the relationship between writer and subject. The “secret” — that Gould’s Oral History may never have existed — transforms the piece from journalism into something closer to literature.

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first in jacket: $100–$300
• Unsigned first in jacket: $30–$60

Mitchell’s last publication — after this book, he wrote nothing for the remaining thirty-one years of his life. The scarcity of signed copies reflects both the era (1965 signing culture was minimal) and Mitchell’s private nature.