Mitchell was born in Bath, Maine, the home of his maternal grandparents. Mitchell's family were wealthy at the time of his birth. When he was eight years old, his parents moved with him to
New York City, to a house on
Fifth Avenue directly across from the future site of the
New York Public Library's main branch. His family were Congregationalists. In 1863 he witnessed the
Draft Riots, later describing them in his memoirs. In the aftermath of the bloody riots, Mitchell's father moved the family to Tar River, North Carolina. While living there, as a boy of fourteen, young Mitchell's letters to
The Bath Times (his birthplace's local paper) were his first published writing. The one great personal tragedy of Mitchell's life was a bizarre accident in 1872, when he was twenty years old. On a train journey from
Bowdoin College to Bath, Maine, a hot cinder from the engine's smokestack flew in through the window and struck Mitchell's left eye, blinding it. After several weeks, while doctors attempted to restore this eye's sight, Mitchell's uninjured right eye suddenly underwent
sympathetic blindness, rendering him completely blind. His burnt left eye eventually healed and regained its sight, but his uninjured right eye remained blind. The blind eye was later removed surgically, and replaced with a prosthetic glass eye. While recovering from this surgery, Mitchell wrote his story "The Tachypomp". Mitchell first became a professional journalist at the
Daily Advertiser in
Boston, Massachusetts, where his mentor was
Edward Everett Hale, now also recognized as an early author of science fiction. Mitchell had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and paranormal, and several of his early newspaper pieces are factual investigations of alleged hauntings, usually determined (by Mitchell) to have a normal explanation. Mitchell later interviewed and befriended
Madame Blavatsky, the well-known alleged psychic, yet he considered her a fraud despite their friendship. Mitchell's entree to
The Sun, where he eventually found long-term employment, was his ghost story "Back from that Bourne". Fiction published as fact, this purported to be the true account of a recently deceased resident of Maine returning as a ghost. One of Mitchell's later stories, "An Uncommon Sort of Spectre", is one of fiction's earliest examples of a ghost from the future. Many of Mitchell's fictions—published originally as factual newspaper articles—deal with ghosts or other supernatural events, and would now be considered works of fantasy rather than science fiction. Mitchell often inserted more than one innovative concept into a science-fiction tale. His 1879 story "The Senator's Daughter", set in the future year 1937, contains several technological predictions which were daring for the time: 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). This same story contains several social predictions: votes for American women, a war between the United States and China (with China winning), and interracial marriage. In 1874, Mitchell married Annie Sewall Welch. During the early years of Mitchell's tenure at the
Sun, they lived in an apartment on
Madison Avenue, where the marriage produced two sons. (The second son was born during a visit to relatives in Bath, Maine.) The need for larger quarters brought the couple to
Bloomfield, New Jersey, where they lived while their next two sons were born. By all accounts, Mitchell's family life was happy. One of Mitchell's colleagues at the
Sun was that paper's night editor
Garrett P. Serviss, who would also become an important figure in early science fiction. Mitchell was a longtime resident of
Glen Ridge, New Jersey and is credited with founding the community: he moved to this region when it was comparatively unpopulated, and his local influence led others to build houses there. On July 20, 1903, Mitchell became editor-in-chief of the New York
Sun, at that time the leading newspaper in the United States. In 1912, following his first wife's death, he married Ada M. Burroughs; this marriage produced a fifth son. Mitchell remained a popular and respected figure in American journalism until his death of a cerebral hemorrhage in New London, Connecticut. He was buried in his beloved Glen Ridge. During his lifetime, his journalism paid him well, and he clearly had no desire for public recognition, since he had many opportunities to achieve this yet never attempted to do so. == In popular culture ==