IRRESISTIBLE CALLING

Sean Mitchell was teaching English at a private school in Ohio when the New Journalism piqued his interest and lured him toward a profession that was much harder to crack than he imagined. After an editor in Washington, D.C. finally gave him a chance, he found a calling that would require and reveal multiple skills: editing an “underground” newspaper in his hometown of Dallas, writing magazine length stories about long distance truckers and Z.Z. Top, serving as the Dallas Times Herald’s first rock critic and then its theatre critic, winning national recognition for his reviews.

Moving to Los Angeles to cover Hollywood for the strangely singular and doomed Herald Examiner and then the Los Angeles Times, he profiled stars like Clint Eastwood, Ann-Margret and his irascible former St. Mark’s School of Texas soccer teammate Tommy Lee Jones. While examining the nation’s preoccupation with celebrity, he wondered if journalists like him were part of the problem or part of the solution?

Sean Mitchell grew up in Dallas, where he was editor of the city’s first alternative weekly, then a reporter and cultural critic for the Dallas Times Herald, before moving to Los Angeles to cover Hollywood for the Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times. A graduate of St. Mark’s School of Texas and Brown University, he has also worked as an English teacher, videographer, and designer of custom wood fences.