Edward Page Mitchell

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Edward Page Mitchell (born March 24, 1852 in Bath , Maine , † January 22, 1927 in New London , Connecticut ) was an American editor and writer. He wrote mainly for the New York daily newspaper The Sun , for which he was an executive from 1897. Mitchell, who mostly published his stories anonymously, is now considered an important figure in early science fiction literature. He wrote stories about time travel ( The Clock That Went Backward ), teleportation, aliens, mind transfers, and other topics that have become standard repertoire in science fiction literature today.

Life

Mitchell was born in Bath, Maine in 1852 to a wealthy family who moved to New York in 1860 . In 1863 he witnessed the bloody draft riots there , after which his father moved the family home to Tar River, North Carolina.

As a young man he worked for various newspapers in Maine and Boston and showed a keen interest in supernatural subjects; many of his early newspaper articles dealt with ghost sightings for which an explanation could then be found. He later made friends with the well-known esoteric Madame Blavatsky , whose supernatural talents, however, he viewed as tricks.

Mitchell's first publication in The Sun was a ghost story, Back from that Bourne , published in 1874 . A series of stories followed in this publication by 1886, most of which we would today assign to the science fiction genre. The subject of the first of these stories, The Tachypomp , was the possibility or impossibility of moving faster than light.

Around 1900 he became editor-in-chief of the Sun , the then leading daily newspaper in the USA. He held this post until the mid-1920s and died in New London, Connecticut in 1927.

New discovery as a science fiction author

The rediscovery of Mitchell's literary work is based on the anthology of the author's texts, The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell , published by Sam Moskowitz in 1973 , to which a longer foreword with details on Mitchell's life was added. Moskowitz called Mitchell the lost giant of American science fiction . Mitchell's stories often included technically innovative concepts; For example, in the story The Senator's Daughter , published in 1879 and set in 1937, he describes the transport of people in compressed air-operated tubes, electrical heating systems, newspapers printed electronically in one's own home, international news broadcasts and cryogenic practices. He also predicted universal suffrage for women, multiracial marriages and a war between the USA and China (which China wins) for the future described. Two of his works describe fictional phenomena commonly attributed to HG Wells , the time machine in The Clock That Went Backward and the invisible man in The Crystal Man ; whether Wells was familiar with Mitchell's stories is unknown.

Fantastic stories

All stories were first in The Sun published.

  • Back from that Bourne (1874)
  • The Tachypomp (1874)
  • The Story of the Deluge (1875)
  • The Soul Spectroscope (1875)
  • The Inside of the Earth (1876)
  • The Man Without a Body (1877)
  • The Case of the Dow Twins (1877)
  • Exchanging Their Souls (1877)
  • The Cave of the Splurgles (1877)
  • To Extraordinary Wedding (1878)
  • The Devilish Rat (1878)
  • The Pain Epicures (1878)
  • The Terrible Voyage of the “Toad” (1878)
  • The Facts in the Ratcliff Case (1879)
  • The Devil's Funeral (1879)
  • An Uncommon Sort of Specter (1879)
  • The Ablest Man in the World (1879)
  • The Senator's Daughter (1879)
  • The Professor's Experiment (1880)
  • Our War With Monaco (1880)
  • The Crystal Man (1881)
  • The Clock That Went Backward (1881)
  • The Wonderful Corot (1881)
  • The Last Cruise of the “Judas Iscariot” (1882)
  • The Balloon Tree (1883)
    • English :: The balloon tree. In: Erik Simon , Olaf R. Spittel (ed.): Drive through infinity: stories of unusual journeys and strange planets. Das Neue Berlin (Classic Science Fiction Stories), 1988, ISBN 3-360-00184-2 .
  • The Flying Weathercock (1884)
  • The Legendary Ship (1885)
  • Old Squids and Little Speller (1885)
  • A Day Among the Liars (1885)
  • The Shadow on the Fancher Twins (1886)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Edward Page Mitchell in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved April 8, 2019.
  2. ↑ Sam Moskowitz (1973), "The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell, collected and with a biographical perspective by Sam Moskowitz". ISBN 0-385-03139-4
  3. ↑ Moskowitz, p. xxviii
  4. ↑ Moskowitz, p. 25
  5. ↑ Moskowitz, p. 70
  6. ↑ http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.de/2012/10/albert-page-mitchell-1852-1927.html
  7. ↑ Moskowitz, p. 9
  8. ↑ Moskowitz, p. 59

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mitchell, Edward Page
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American editor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1852
PLACE OF BIRTH Bath , Maine
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1927
Place of death New London , Connecticut