Edward Page Mitchell

Who was Edward Page Mitchell?

Edward Page Mitchell was an American editorial and short story writer for The Sun, a daily newspaper in New York City. He became that newspaper's editor in 1897, succeeding Charles Anderson Dana. Mitchell retired in 1926, a year before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. Decades after his death, Mitchell 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 before H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man, wrote about a time-travel machine before Wells's The Time Machine, wrote about faster-than-light travel in 1874, a thinking computer and a cyborg in 1879, and also wrote the earliest known stories about matter transmission or teleportation and a superior mutant. "Exchanging Their Souls" is one of the earliest fictional accounts of mind transfer.

The gradual rediscovery of Mitchell and his work is a direct result of the publication in 1973 of a book-length anthology of his stories, compiled by Sam Moskowitz with a detailed introduction by Moskowitz giving much information about Mitchell's personal life.