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| Edward Page Mitchell |
It was the late 1970's, I had just graduated from a technical college and was preparing resumes for either employment or further studies at the university level and thought that the best place to get updated, current information would be my local community library. Daily, I would pack a lunch and make my way to the library with intentions of spending the day if need be. When I believed that I had fulfilled my obligation, I would then spend my remaining time (until the library closed) researching and reading science fiction as well as other works of fiction and best sellers. One day, the librarian approached me and asked in a kind but inquisitive manner: "What are you up to? You're here every day, often the whole day." I detailed where my life had brought thus far and why I was here on a constant daily basis. She asked me: "What genres do you enjoy reading?" and I told her: "Mostly science fiction." She went about her business; in a short time, she returned and said to me that she had gone to seek permission from her superior to allow me into the libraries stacks in the basement where I might find some rare science fiction treasures. I gathered my papers and such, and we descended into the library stacks where books from years past were entombed. I must confess, at this point, I felt like an archeologist who had just stumbled upon the lost library at Alexandria and was about to awaken these slumbering sages. I spent hours among this repository of dust and knowledge and finally espied a book with no dust cover, but with a name on the spine that seemed to command attention. I opened the front cover to the introduction, read the first paragraph and was hooked. I ascended the stairs back into the present with my trophy and showed the librarian what I had found. She permitted me to enjoy the book and to: "Just return the book" when I was finished. I am convinced now as was then, that I had found an author who was little known among the reading science fiction community and because of this intuition decided to introduce Edward Page Mitchell to a potential new audience.
Allow me to introduce you to Edward Page Mitchell, whom according to Sam Moskowitz ( who helped rediscover Mitchell's work in a 1973 anthology as well as providing a lengthy introduction into Mitchell's personal life): is the lost giant of American science fiction. Much of what is known about Mitchell comes from the primary research Moskowitz conducted into Mitchell's life. I, for one, was grateful for the work Mr. Moskowitz complied, since when I tried to do my own, very little was written concern the details of Mitchell's life. So then, who was Edward Page Mitchell? Mitchell was born in Bath. Maine 1852; at the age of eight his family moved to New York City into a house on Fifth Avenue directly across the street from the future site of the New York Public Library's main branch. He was witness to the Draft Riots of 1863 which he later described in his memoirs. During his family's move to Tar River, NC, at the age of fourteen, Mitchell letters to the Bath Times constituted his first published works.
When he was twenty years old, Mitchell was involved in a freakishly bizarre accident involving a hot ember from the smokestack of train engine which entered in from an open window and blinded his left eye. During recovery, however, his right eye lapsed into sympathetic blindness, he was now dealing with complete and total blindness. Due to some unusual, unexplainable, biological circumstance, the right eye developed pathogenesis which involved extraction and subsequent replacement with a glass one. During convalescence, Mitchell penned "The Tachypomp" (April 1874).
Mitchell's first professional job was with The Daily Advertiser, Boston, MA under the mentorship of Edward Evertt Hale (also an early science fiction author). He had an interest in the paranormal and many of his early pieces had an air of the supernatural investigative reporting style.
He eventually found long-term employment as editor and short story contributor for The Sun (a daily New York City newspaper).
Mitchell was not disinclined to introduce innovative concepts to his fiction. "The Senator's Daughter," written in 1879 occurs in the future of 1937 and broaches the prognostications: travel by pneumatic tube, electrical heating, newspapers printed in the home by electrical transmission, food-pellet concentrates, international broadcasts, and the suspended animation of a living human being through freezing (cryogenics). Social morays of the time are also approached: votes for American women, a war between the United States and China (with China winning), and interracial marriage.
Mitchell married in 1874 (Annie Sewall Welch) the union produced two sons. As his family grew, they moved from an apartment on Madison Avenue to Bloomfield, New Jersey; it was here that the family once again expanded with the addition of two more sons. All this while he worked as an editor/story writer for The Sun and was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board for many years. In the year 1903, Mithcell became editor-in-chief of the New York Sun which, incidentally, was recognized as the nation's leading newspaper of the time. Tragedy struck Mitchell's life when Annie Sewall Welch suddenly died in 1912. Mitchell remarried ( Ada M. Burroughs) and had a fifth son.
Mithcell was a great admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, and one can sense his strong influence in Mitchell's work. One sure trademark of style that Mitchell borrowed from Poe was the use of outlandish, somewhat suggestive names to his characters that took themselves too seriously, a good example: "Professor Dummkopf" in Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body."
The following is a list of his short stories all which appeared as newspaper publications and which in its variety and imaginative power may have influenced H.G. Wells and others:
- a man rendered invisible by scientific means ("The Crystal Man," published in 1881), 16 years before H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man,
- a time-travel machine ("The Clock that Went Backward") before Wells's The Time Machine,
- faster-than-light travel ("The Tachypomp"; now perhaps his best-known work) in 1874,
- a thinking computer and a cyborg in 1879 ("The Ablest Man in the World")
- about matter transmission or teleportation ("The Man without a Body," 1877)
- a superior mutant ("Old Squids and Little Speller").
- "Exchanging Their Souls" (1877) is one of the earliest fictional accounts of mind transfer
Mitchell retired in 1926 and sadly died the following year of a cerebral hemorrhage. It's interesting to note that during Mitchell's lifetime as a professional journalist, never once did he strive for public recognition as an author of fiction; life had given him ample opportunities to do so, but he never pursued them.
And so, this is a brief account of Edward Page Mitchell, as far as I'm concerned: the lost giant of American science fiction who has been found.
Works by Edward Page Mitchell
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