Joe Gould's Teeth

Jill Lepore: For a long time, Joe Gould thought he was going blind. This was before he lost his teeth, and years before he lost the history of the world he'd been writing in hundreds of dime-store composition notebooks, their black covers mottled like the pelt of a speckled goat, their white pages lined with thin blue veins.

He wrote with a fountain pen. He filled it with ink he stole from the post office. "I have created a vital new literary form," he boasted. "Unfortunately, my manuscript is not typed."

He told everyone who would listen that he was writing down nearly everything anyone said to him. "I am trying to record these complex times with the technique of a Herodotus or Froissart,"…