Edward Page Mitchell (1852-1927)

Edward Page Mitchell, son of x and x, was born in Bath, ME on 24 Mar 1852 and died in New London, CT on 22 Jan 1927.  In 1874 he married Annie Sewall Welch and with her had four sons. Following Annie's death, he married Ada M. Burroughs with whom he had his fifth son.

An editorial and short story writer for the New York Sun, he became that newspaper's editor in 1897 and retired in 1926 (a year before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage). Decades after his death, he was recognized as a major figure in the early development of the science fiction genre. 

Decades after his death, he was recognized as a major figure in the early development of the science fiction genre. Mitchell wrote fiction about a man rendered invisible by scientific means ("The Crystal Man", 1881) before "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells's, wrote about a time-travel machine ("The Clock that Went Backward") before Wells' "The Time Machine," wrote about faster-than-light travel ("The Tachypomp, 1874") -- now perhaps his best-known work, a thinking computer and a cyborg ("The Ablest Man in the World", 1879), the earliest known stories about matter transmission or teleportation ("The Man without a Body", 1877) and a superior mutant ("Old Squids and Little Speller"). "Exchanging Their Souls" (1877) is one of the earliest fictional accounts of mind transfer.

Hear it HERE
The Clock that Went Backward

The gradual rediscovery of Mitchell and his work is a direct result of the 1973 publication of a book-length anthology of his stories that was ompiled by Sam Moskowitz. Because Mitchell's stories were not indexed or by-lined on original publication, Moskowitz expended major effort to track down and collect these works by an author whom Moskowitz cited as "the lost giant of American science fiction".

Mitchell's stories show the strong influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Among other traits, he shares Poe's habit of giving a basically serious and dignified fictional character a jokey name, such as "Professor Dummkopf" in "The Man Without a Body". Since Mitchell's fictions were originally published in newspapers, typeset in the same format as news articles and not identified as fiction, he may possibly have used this device to signal to his readers that this text should not be taken seriously.