Joe Gould's SecretBy: Joseph Mitchell It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer Nicci French, Independent It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History the longest book ever written he