Mitchell, John Hanson 1940-

PERSONAL:

Born April 25, 1940, in Englewood, NJ; son of James A. Mitchell (an Episcopalian minister) and Virginia P. Mitchell (a school teacher); married Margaret Street (divorced, September, 1992), married Jill S.G. Brown, June, 1996; children: (first marriage) Clayton, Lelia. Education: Columbia University, B.S., 1967.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Littleton, MA. Office—Massachusetts Audubon Society, South Great Rd., Lincoln, MA 01773. Agent—William Reiss, John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., 71 W. 23rd St., Ste. 1600, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER:

Environmental Centers of Hartford, Hartford, CT, director, 1967-70; freelance writer, 1970-73; Massachusetts Audubon Society, Lincoln, MA, assistant editor, 1973-80; editor of Sanctuary, 1980—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Honorary Ph.D., Fitchburg State University, 1988; John Burroughs Essay Award, 1994; New England Booksellers' Award, 2000, for body of work.

WRITINGS:

Hiking Cape Cod, Eastwoods Press (New York, NY), 1975.

The Curious Naturalist, illustrated by Gordon Morrison, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1980.

(Editor, with Wayne Hanley) The Energy Book, illustrated by Gordon Morrison, Greene (Lexington, MA), 1980.

Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, illustrated by Gordon Morrison, Anchor Press (New York, NY), 1984.

A Field Guide to Your Own Back Yard, illustrated by Laurel Molk, Norton (New York, NY), 1985.

Living at the End of Time, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1990.

Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of John Hanson Mitchell, illustrated by Robert Leverett, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1995.

(With Christopher Leahy and Thomas Conuel) The Nature of Massachusetts, illustrated by Lars Jonsson, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1996.

Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1998.

The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness, illustrated by James A. Mitchell, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2001.

Following the Sun: From Spain to the Hebrides, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2002.

Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American, Shoemaker & Hoard (Emeryville, CA), 2005.

The Rose Café: Love and War in Corsica, Shoemaker & Hoard (Emeryville, CA), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author John Hanson Mitchell has been writing about nature, especially man's relation to it, for more than twenty years. In the books Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile and Living at the End of Time, Mitchell uses his experience and knowledge of a few scant acres of New England woodland to arrive at far-reaching notions concerning humanity's relationship with the earth. Both volumes, written as essays, rely as much on Mitchell's own life and personal vision as on the natural history of the region.

The one square mile of land known as "Scratch Flat," thirty-five miles outside Boston, Massachusetts, served as Mitchell's study ground for Ceremonial Time. In the New York Times Book Review, critic John Anthony West observed that Mitchell scrutinized the area "from every imaginable angle. He … consulted geologists, archaeologists, local characters, environmentalists, romantics, computer experts, Indian shamans, anyone and everyone who might provide some fresh insight into the past or present or future of Scratch Flat." Indeed, the notion of time—specifically, time as perceived by the Native Americans who originally inhabited the land—is central to the author's relationship with Scratch Flat. "The title proper, Ceremonial Time, is an Indian concept that makes an ocean of time, an all-encompassing sea that humanity shares eternally with the spirits of yesterday and tomorrow, free of the temporal linear constructions—minutes, months, centuries, millennia—that white men brought to this continent in 1620," commented John N. Cole in the Washington Post Book World. According to Cole, Mitchell portrays the events of the ice age by applying "Indian theology … to his graceful prose." Two Native Americans, Nompenekit and Tonupasqua (who are both ultimately descended from the Paleo-Indians that populated the region fourteen thousand years ago), aided the author with their knowledge of the ancient religion and rites practiced by their tribe well before the advent of white Europeans. Mitchell looks to the years ahead, also, even as road and home construction impinge on his one square mile of undeveloped land. After considering various fates, which could spell the demise of Scratch Flat, he opts for an optimistic alternative—the return to the values of the land's original settlers, the Native American. West appreciated the author's use of Scratch Flat as a microcosm, remarking: "By concentrating on the particular, he has illuminated the universal. I can think of no book that provides so personal and yet so comprehensive a view of America, past, present and, potentially, future."

Mitchell wrote Living at the End of Time after a divorce prompted him to build a cottage in the forest behind his former home; the book itself is a meditation on humanity's interaction with nature, written in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (a treatise on the appreciation of nature as well as a wide-ranging critique of morals and customs in mid-nineteenth century New England). Walden Pond, the secluded site near Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau lived and wrote in a small cabin, is only a short distance from Mitchell's own cottage. Like Thoreau, Mitchell used his solitude in the woods to examine issues that surpass mere surveys of flora and fauna. In Living at the End of Time, he tracks the legacy left behind by people who formerly occupied the territory. According to John R. Stilgoe, writing in the New York Times Book Review, the book "probes at land that has been touched and then abandoned—at holes left by long-gone cellars, at toppled stone walls and at rusted farm equipment smothered in ordinary forest." The author also portrays the various people he met while roaming the countryside and describes their unique link to the land. In the words of Stilgoe, Mitchell tells of "the local drunkard who camps out in the undergrowth of the interstate highway cloverleaf" to the European couple who had escaped Nazism and wish to farm self-sufficiently, free from any government interference. Michael Harris, a critic in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, stated that these "portraits" are "the best parts of Living at the End of Time." Stilgoe praised the author's depth of perception in the New York Times Book Review, remarking that "Mr. Mitchell offers a penetrating assessment of the usefulness of ordinary woods."

Walking towards Walden is another Thoreau-esque work, of which was described as "a combination guide book and memoir peppered with morsels of mythology, folklore, nature, literature, art, and history" by Patricia Hassler in Booklist. Mitchell and two friends set out on Columbus Day to walk the fifteen miles to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts are buried. As they walked along an overgrown trail that was once taken by Revolutionary soldiers, they talked about people's devotion to a particular place, about quests and pilgrimages, and about a variety of other philosophical topics.

In Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land, Mitchell uses the history of a plot of land near his home to question the Western concept of land ownership. In 1654, the Puritans granted sixteen square miles of northeastern Massachusetts to some Pawtucket Indians who had become Christians. Twenty years later, the Puritans removed the tribe to an island in Boston Harbor during a war between the settlers and other Native American tribes; many of them died. The survivors eventually returned, but the tribe soon died out: the last survivor, Sarah Doublet, passed away in 1736. The land was then held by a variety of private, corporate, and governmental owners for over two hundred years, until activists seeking to block a new housing development convinced the town to purchase the part of it that was to be developed and to turn it into communal open space. From the history of this one piece of land, Mitchell expands to look at other ways of bringing privately held land into the public domain—devices such as land trusts, conservation easements, and greenbelts, for example—as well as trespassing, which Mitchell justifies by calling it "the only way to get to know a place."

Reviewers were generally positive about Trespassing. Audubon contributor Verlyn Klinkenborg said: "The beauty of Trespassing lies partly in the subtlety Mitchell brings to these questions [of ownership], his willingness to weigh the common need against the private right," as well as "in Mitchell's intimacy with the tract of land … and with its occupants, human and wild." A Publishers Weekly reviewer was pleased by the fact that "Mitchell neither scolds nor soothes, offering instead anecdote, history, law and keen naturalist observations."

In The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness, Mitchell moves beyond his New England home to discuss the invention of the concept of wilderness in the gardens of ancient Egypt, medieval England, and of course Renaissance Italy. Like all of Mitchell's texts, "this poetic little book," as a Publishers Weekly reviewer described it, is full of anecdotes, personal recollections, and philosophical musings.

Following the Sun: From Spain to the Hebrides chronicles a three-month, 1,500-mile bicycle journey that took the author from the Spanish port town of Cadiz to the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, where he witnessed the summer solstice. In the work, Mitchell "follows the lengthening days, the blessings of the sun after the winter months, and approaches the pilgrimage in the spirit of a pagan ablate," noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Along the way, remarked Library Journal critic Linda M. Kaufmann, "he meets friends old and new and explores the lore, natural history, science, and culture of the sun." Other reviewers also added favorable comments. "The text is most evocative in the indolent stretches of the sun-washed south," wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, further noting that the author's "penchant for reported speech offers a fascinating picture of Europe."

The inspiration for Mitchell's 2005 work Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American came to the author some thirty years earlier, when he discovered a series of antique glass plate negatives in the attic of an Massachusetts farmhouse. Although Mitchell believed the photographs had been taken by esteemed nineteenth-century ornithologist William Brewster, he later suspected that they were the work of Brewster's assistant, Robert A. Gilbert. "In prose as smoothly cadenced as the Concord River so frequently depicted in those images," remarked a critic in Kirkus Reviews, "Mitchell takes readers along … to learn more about the man who was Brewster's inseparable amanuensis." According to Vanessa Bush, writing in Booklist, "Mitchell renders astonishingly detailed descriptions, giving flesh to the sparse historical record of Gilbert's achievements." Black Issues Book Review contributor Eric Addison suggested: "Photography is the book's main motif, and it works beautifully, capturing the author's passionate yearning to … learn more about his subject and the world he lived in."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, December, 1996, review of Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of John Hanson Mitchell, p. 1166.

Audubon, May-June, 1998, Verlyn Klinkenborg, review of Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land, pp. 106-108.

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005, Eric Addison, review of Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American, p. 54.

Booklist, November 1, 1995, Patricia Hassler, review of Walking towards Walden, p. 450; March 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness, p. 1343; February 1, 2005, Vanessa Bush, review of Looking for Mr. Gilbert, p. 935.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1998, review of Trespassing, p. 475; February 15, 2001, review of The Wildest Place on Earth, p. 240; April 1, 2002, review of Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Spain to the Herbides, p. 473; December 15, 2004, review of Looking for Mr. Gilbert, p. 1187.

Library Journal, October 15, 1995, Tim Markus, review of Walking towards Walden, p. 85; May 15, 2002, Linda M. Kaufmann, review of Following the Sun, p. 116.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 22, 1990, Michael Harris, review of Living at the End of Time, p. 6.

New York Times Book Review, August 12, 1984, John Anthony West, review of Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, p. 27; May 13, 1990, John R. Stilgoe, "Thoreau with Bottled Gas," p. 33.

Publishers Weekly, June 22, 1998, review of Trespassing, p. 78; September 18, 1995, review of Walking towards Walden, p. 119; March 19, 2001, review of The Wildest Place on Earth, p. 91; April 15, 2002, review of Following the Sun, p. 56.

Smithsonian, February, 1999, Paul Trachtman, "Book Reviews," p. 148.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1999, review of Trespassing, p. 26.

Washington Post Book World, July 16, 1984, John N. Cole, review of Ceremonial Time.

Yankee, October, 1996, Geoffrey Elan, review of Walking towards Walden, p. 450.