Nonfiction / Memoir
The only child of two working-class parents from eastern Pennsylvania, an “accidental Texan” grows up in Dallas in the 1950s and ‘60s, attends an elite boys school, then finds himself searching for disappearing traditions in the Ivy League.
Staring across the generation gap, he becomes a high school English teacher in Cincinnati before the siren songs of pop culture and journalism lead him back home to Texas and the beginning of a dispiriting job search. After discovering an alarming lack of interest in his becoming a member of the media, he finally meets an editor who gives him a chance, allowing him to display the disparate talents required for magazine writing and theater criticism before moving to Los Angeles to confront the colossus of Hollywood.
SEAN MITCHELL was the editor of Dallas’ legendary alternative weekly, The Iconoclast, a prize-winning critic and feature writer for the Dallas Times Herald and later a Hollywood reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He looks back on those experiences, as well as his schooling (St. Mark’s, Brown) and parents (folksinger Lu Mitchell and the art museum’s Gene Mitchell) in his new memoir Irresistible Calling: A Memoir of Journalism and the Arts, published by TCU Press. An excerpt can be found in the November issue of D Magazine.