Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking [NOOK Book]

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Overview

Jessica Mitford was a member of one of England’s most legendary families (among her sisters were the novelist Nancy Mitford and the current Duchess of Devonshire) and one of the great muckraking journalists of modern times. Leaving England for America, she pursued a career as an investigative reporter and unrepentant gadfly, publicizing not only the misdeeds of, most famously, the funeral business (The American Way of Death, a bestseller) and the prison business (Kind and Usual Punishment), but also of writing ...
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Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

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Overview

Jessica Mitford was a member of one of England’s most legendary families (among her sisters were the novelist Nancy Mitford and the current Duchess of Devonshire) and one of the great muckraking journalists of modern times. Leaving England for America, she pursued a career as an investigative reporter and unrepentant gadfly, publicizing not only the misdeeds of, most famously, the funeral business (The American Way of Death, a bestseller) and the prison business (Kind and Usual Punishment), but also of writing schools and weight-loss programs. Mitford’s diligence, unfailing skepticism, and acid pen made her one of the great chroniclers of the mischief people get up to in the pursuit of profit and the name of good. Poison Penmanship collects seventeen of Mitford’s finest pieces—about everything from crummy spas to network-TV censorship—and fills them out with the story of how she got the scoop and, no less fascinating, how the story developed after publication. The book is a delight to read: few journalists have ever been as funny as Mitford, or as gifted at getting around in those dark, cobwebbed corners where modern America fashions its shiny promises. It’s also an unequaled and necessary manual of the fine art of investigative reporting.

"As good a primer on reporting as I've read, a powerful antidote to all the recent mumbo-jumbo written about journalism-as-art."---Carl Bernstein

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781590175293
  • Publisher: New York Review Books
  • Publication date: 5/9/2012
  • Series: New York Review Books Classics Series
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 750,699
  • File size: 432 KB

Meet the Author

Jessica Mitford (1917–1996) was the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, and she and her five sisters and one brother grew up in isolation on their parents’ Cotswold estate. Rebelling against her family’s hidebound conservatism, Mitford became an outspoken socialist and, with her second cousin and husband-to-be Esmond Romilly, ran away to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Romilly was killed in World War II, and Mitford moved to America, where she married the lawyer and political activist Robert Treuhaft. A brilliant muckraking journalist, Mitford was the author of, among other works, a memoir of her youth, Hons and Rebels (also published as an NYRB Classic); a study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death; and Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business. She died at the age of seventy-eight while working on a follow-up to The American Way of Death, for which, with characteristic humor, she proposed the title “Death Warmed Over.”

Jane Smiley, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is the author of many novels and other works. In 2010 she published Private Life, a novel; A Good Horse, a book for young adults; and The Man Who Invented the Computer, the first volume of the Sloane American Inventors series.
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Table of Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 3

Trial by Headline 28

Comment 40

St. Peter, Don't You Call Me 43

Comment 50

Proceed with Caution 53

Comment 57

You-All and Non-You-All 60

Comment 76

Americans Don't Want Fancy Funerals 79

My Way of Life Since The American Way of Death 89

"Something to Offend Everyone" 93

Comment On Three Funeral Pieces 103

Don't Call It Syphilis 108

Comment 124

Maine Chance Diary 128

Comment 145

Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers 148

Comment 170

A Talk with George Jackson 182

Comment 190

My Short and Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor 192

Comment 214

The Best of Frenemies 217

Comment 220

Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove 222

The Dove Strikes Back 225

Comment On Two "Dove" Pieces 230

Waiting for O'Hara 234

Comment 244

Egyptomania 246

Comment 271

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