Greg Mitchell - Biography

Biography

Greg Mitchell's latest book, published in November 2011, is "40 Days that Shook the World: From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere." His previous book, published in August 2011, was "Atomic Cover-Up," exploring the suppression of film footage from Hiroshima shot by two U.S. soldiers. Other recent books are "The Age of WikiLeaks: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond)" and "Bradley Manning."

Mitchell currently writes a daily media blog for The Nation. His previous book, published in January 2009, was "Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008" (Sinclair Books). Before that, in March 2008, appeared his book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed in Iraq (Union Square Press). It includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by war reporter Joseph L. Galloway. His 1992 book for Random House, "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics," which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, was recently published in its first e-book edition.

Mitchell is married to writer Barbara Bedway, and they live in Nyack, New York. The couple has a son, Andy, now a filmmaker, about whom he has written regarding their experiences together in Little League baseball in the memoir Joy in Mudville. Mitchell has a daughter, Jeni, from a previous marriage, who lives in London.

His influential blog, launched at The Nation in April 2010, is updated several times a day at the magazine's web site. He also blogs regularly for Huffington Post, among other sites and has a popular Twitter feed @GregMitch.

Mitchell was editor of Nuclear Times magazine from 1982 to 1986 and has written widely about the atomic bombings for dozens of magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and the Washington Post.

Mitchell is co-author of a book with Robert Jay Lifton on the perceptions in the United States of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. In an interview, he discussed the long-censored stories of Chicago Tribune correspondent George Weller, the first Western news reporter to reach Nagasaki after the atomic bombing.

He wrote a second book with Lifton about capital punishment called Who Owns Death?

Mitchell has written a pair of acclaimed books about famous California political campaigns. One was The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair's race for governor in 1934 and the birth of media-driven elections. It was made into a PBS documentary for "The Great Depression" series and was produced in the theater as a musical. His book, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon Vs Helen Gahagan Douglas--Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 homes in on an era in California politics as it impacted national politics.

In the 1970s, Mitchell was senior editor at the legendary Crawdaddy! magazine where he is credited with writing (with Crawdaddy editor Peter Knobler) the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen.