James Howard Mitcham (1917 in

Winona, Mississippi } Winona is a city in Montgomery County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 5,043 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Montgomery County. Winona is known in the local area as "The Crossroads of North Mississippi"; the interse ...

– August 22, 1996 in Hyannis, Massachusetts) was an American artist, poet, and cook best known for his books on

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...

's Creole and

Cajun The Cajuns (; French: ''les Cadjins'' or ''les Cadiens'' ), also known as Louisiana ''Acadians'' (French: ''les Acadiens''), are a Louisiana French ethnicity mainly found in the U.S. state of Louisiana. While Cajuns are usually described as ...

cuisines and that of

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Can ...

, with an emphasis on seafood.

Deaf Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an audiological condition. In this context it is written ...

from

spinal meningitis Meningitis is acute or chronic inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, collectively called the meninges. The most common symptoms are fever, headache, and neck stiffness. Other symptoms include confusion o ...

as a teenager, Mitcham attended

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University (officially Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as LSU) is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 nea ...

and moved to

Greenwich Village Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...

where he owned an art gallery. He acquired a reputation as a bohemian, raconteur, and "Renaissance man", spending much of his life in

Provincetown, Massachusetts Provincetown is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in the United States. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of 3,664 as of the 2020 United States Census, Province ...

and

New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans

. He contributed a column to the ''Provincetown Advocate'', since absorbed by the ''Banner''. Many of his books combined personal memoir and recipes with his own woodcuts and drawings. Anthony Bourdain has described Mitcham's ''Provincetown Seafood Cookbook'' as "a witty, informative ode to local seafood, sprinkled with anecdotes". He was the model for the "stone-deaf man" in

Marguerite Young Marguerite Vivian Young (August 26, 1908 – November 17, 1995) was an American novelist and academic. She is best known for her novel '' Miss MacIntosh, My Darling''. In her later years, she was known for teaching creative writing and as ...

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling ''Miss MacIntosh, My Darling'' is a novel by Marguerite Young. She has described it as "an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise."''Wo ...

''.

Books

* ''Fishing on the Gulf Coast'', The Hermit Crab Press, New Orleans 1959 * ''Four Tales from Byzantium'', edition of 150 numbered copies printed by Wattle Grove Press, Newnham,Tasmania 1964 * ''Provincetown Seafood Cookbook'', The Hermit Crab Press, Provincetown 1975, * ''Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz: A New Orleans Seafood Cookbook'', Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading,MA 1978, * ''Maya o Maya!: Rambunctious fables of Yucatán'', edition of 500 numbered copies printed by The Hermit Crab Press, New Orleans 1981 * ''Tales from Byzantium'', edition of 1000 numbered copies printed by The Hermit Crab Press, New Orleans 1984 * ''Clams, Mussels, Oysters, Scallops, and Snails: A Cookbook and a Memoir'', Parnassus Imprints, Orleans,MA 1990,

References

External links

Obituary
from the

New Orleans Times-Picayune ''The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate'' is an American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana, since January 25, 1837. The current publication is the result of the 2019 acquisition of ''The Times-Picayune'' (itself a result of th ...

, from

Rootsweb Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites. In November 2018, ...

Article
in the

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

including Bourdain's comments {{DEFAULTSORT:Mitcham, Howard 1917 births 1996 deaths American food writers Artists from New Orleans Louisiana State University alumni Deaf artists People from Provincetown, Massachusetts Deaf poets Writers from New Orleans 20th-century poets 20th-century American non-fiction writers People from Winona, Mississippi American deaf people American artists with disabilities American writers with disabilities

Books

See also

References

External links