Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her first and only novel, Gone With the Wind. The best-selling Civil War romance was published in 1936 and later turned into one of the most famous movies of the era, with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in the roles of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara. The film won the 1939 Academy Award for best picture, plus seven other Oscars.
In 1992 author Alexandra Ripley published Scarlett, a sequel to Gone With the Wind authorized by Mitchell's estate... Mitchell is no relation to fellow writer Joseph Mitchell... Margaret Mitchell should not be confused with Martha Mitchell, the so-called "Mouth of the South" who was the wife of Watergate-era Attorney General John Mitchell.
(born Nov. 8, 1900, Atlanta, Ga., U.S. — died Aug. 16, 1949, Atlanta) U.S. writer. Mitchell attended Smith College and then wrote for The Atlanta Journal before spending 10 years writing her one book, Gone with the Wind (1936, Pulitzer Prize; film, 1939). A story of the American Civil War and Reconstruction from the white Southern point of view, it was almost certainly the largest-selling novel in the history of U.S. publishing to that time. A parody of the book, as told from a slave's point of view, The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, was published in 2001.
Author of "Gone With the Wind", the most popular novel ever written, Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was born on November 8 in Atlanta, Georgia, the burning of which became a spectacular scene in the immensely successful motion picture made from the book.
As a child Margaret Mitchell was saturated with stories of the Civil War told to her by family members who had lived through it. They indoctrinated her so effectively that Mitchell was ten years old before she learned that the South had lost the war. Her venturesomeness as a young woman, which included a year at Smith College and a subsequent career in Atlanta journalism, reflected the influence of her mother, Maybelle, an ardent supporter of woman suffrage. After her mother's death of influenza during the epidemic of 1918 Mitchell returned to Atlanta. Four years later she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, an attractive, romantic, but violent and unstable man who is often regarded as the prototype of Gone With the Wind's Rhett Butler. Their marriage lasted only three months, although they were not divorced until 1924. The following year Mitchell wedded John Marsh, a union that would last her lifetime.
Mitchell had become a feature writer for the Atlanta Journal in 1922, and by the time she resigned in 1926 she was considered the paper's leading feature writer. These years were, she would later say, the happiest of her life. Yet, despite her success and the pleasure she took in her work, Mitchell bowed to the still powerful convention that a wife should be supported by her husband, leaving the Journal as soon as John's finances permitted. Childless and with no outside obligations, Mitchell turned her hand to fiction and was soon writing what would become Gone With the Wind. She had largely completed the novel in 1935 when Harold Latham, an acquisitions editor at Macmillan, arrived in Atlanta looking for manuscripts. Mitchell served as his guide, and when Latham departed he took with him the huge, unpolished manuscript Mitchell had stuffed into numerous envelopes. Although it was in the worst physical condition of any manuscript he had ever seen, Latham was the first of millions to find it compulsively readable despite its length - which would come to 1,037 printed pages.
Gone With the Wind tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, whose father owns a plantation named Tara during the Civil War and Reconstruction. At its start she falls in love with Ashley Wilkes, a neighbor, who loves and marries the virtuous Melanie Hamilton rather than herself. Out of spite, Scarlett marries Melanie's brother, Charles, who soon dies of various diseases after enlisting in the Confederate Army. Scarlett, now a mother, spends most of the war with Melanie in Atlanta, from which Scarlett and her son and Melanie and her newborn child barely escape when the city is fired, making their way to Tara. In order to save the ruined plantation Scarlett marries again, and is again widowed when her husband is slain leading a Ku Klux Klan attack on the Black section of Atlanta, where Scarlett had been molested by a freedman. After this she marries Rhett Butler, a dashing and dangerous man who has loved her for years and whose wealth will ensure her ownership of Tara. Eventually she realizes that it is Butler she loves after all, not Wilkes, but as by this time she has thoroughly alienated Butler he leaves her with the line immortalized by Clark Gable in the film version: "My dear, I don't give a damn."
Gone With the Wind was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection even before it was published in 1936. The movie rights were quickly purchased by Selznick-International for $50,000, an immense sum during the Great Depression. In 1937 Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Two years later David Selznick's brilliant film adaptation opened in Atlanta to rapturous acclaim, not just in the South but everywhere. Like the book, which had sold eight million copies as of 1949, Gone With the Wind became one of the most popular and durable motion pictures every made. It won ten Academy Awards in 1940 and was the world's highest grossing picture for over 20 years.
Mitchell never wrote again, refusing even to collaborate on the screenplay despite Selznick's entreaties. During World War II she threw herself into defense-related activities, but otherwise spent the rest of her life shepherding her book through many foreign editions, protecting her financial and copyright interests, and answering her extensive fan mail. Considering her extraordinary fame and the fortune her book brought her, happiness seems to have eluded Mitchell. She was subject to bouts of depression. Her last years were clouded by her husband's invalidism following a near-fatal heart attack. Unexpectedly, she died first on August 16, 1949, after being struck by a drunk driver while crossing an Atlanta street.
Among critics Gone With the Wind has always been controversial. Few regard it as great literature, but beginning with the Pulitzer Prize Committee many critics have admired Mitchell's gift for storytelling and the breadth of her canvas. The book has been hailed as a contribution to feminism, held up as an allegory for the development of the United States, and condemned as racist and even sadomasochistic. Racist it unquestionably is - almost inevitably so, given the time and place of its composition. Beyond that, it gives powerful support to damaging stereo-types that for long helped sustain racial segregation. It romanticizes the slave-owning class, and, except perhaps for D.W. Griffith's classic Birth of a Nation, no work has done more to misrepresent Reconstruction as a cruelty visited upon an innocent white South - whereas today historians generally agree that it was an honest, if flawed, attempt to bring real democracy to a region that had never known it. In light of the book's continuing sales the controversy over it seems destined to persist, like Gone With the Wind itself.
Further Reading
The longest biography is Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (1983). A good critical study is Elizabeth I. Hanson, Margaret Mitchell (1991). Although Mitchell's papers were destroyed after her death, she wrote thousands of letters, a selection of which was published by Richard Harwell, ed., as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind Letters, 1936-1949 (1976).
Additional Sources
Edwards, Anne, Road to Tara: the life of Margaret Mitchell, New Haven Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
Pyron, Darden Asbury, Southern daughter: the life of Margaret Mitchell, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Mitchell, Margaret, 1900-1949, American novelist, b. Atlanta, Ga. Her one novel, Gone with the Wind (1936; Pulitzer Prize), a romantic, panoramic portrait of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in Georgia, is one of the most popular novels in the history of American publishing. The film adaptation (1939) has also been extraordinarily successful.
Gone with the Wind. Selling a record-breaking one million copies in its first six months, Mitchell's only novel became the largest-selling book in history behind the Bible and an American cultural phenomenon. Mitchell's 1,307-page opus of the struggles of headstrong Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara before, during, and after the Civil War had been written from 1926 to 1934 and drew on the writer's childhood memories of stories of the South uprooted by history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and adapted in 1939 into one of the most popular films of all time, the novel achieved an unprecedented place in American cultural consciousness.
"Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed."
"The world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business."
"Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for 'Tis the only thing in this world that lasts, 'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for -- worth dying for."
"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived."
"The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings. [Gone With The Wind]"
"Until you have lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is."
First Major Screen Credit: Gone With the Wind (1939)
Biography
Margaret Mitchell was the most successful historical novelist of the mid-20th century, though her work was confined to a single book. That book, Gone With the Wind, was simply the most talked about novel in American popular culture from a time predating its actual publication, and its screen adaptation was the biggest "event" movie of the 20th century. Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born in Atlanta, GA, in 1900, the daughter of attorney Eugene Muse Mitchell and the former May Belle Stephens. She attended the Washington Seminary, a finishing school, and also studied at Smith College, but her mother's death from influenza in the 1918-1919 epidemic made it impossible for her to complete a degree. The latter was no great loss for Mitchell, as much of her education was self-directed, in any case, and she had never excelled in the earning of grades or the taking of tests. She had an insatiable appetite for books, and was consumed by an interest in writing and literature.
Mitchell's twenties coincided with that decade in history, and were a chaotic time for her personally. She lived the free-spirited life of a flapper girl, racing from one paper-thin, decadent diversion to another, and became party to a whirlwind marriage in 1922. Her first husband was no provider, however, a fact that forced Mitchell into a career as a reporter with The Atlanta Journal. The marriage ended completely in 1924, after incidents of physical abuse, and in 1925 she married a friend and colleague named John Robert Marsh. In order to make this marriage work, Mitchell eventually decided to give up her career and settle down to more solitary literary activities -- she turned to writing fiction. In 1927, she began writing the book that eventually became Gone With the Wind. The book went through numerous drafts and the characters through many transformations in name and attributes -- at one point, Scarlett O'Hara was named Pansy O'Hara -- but as hard as Mitchell worked on the book, she was also very defensive about her writing. By 1935 the work, as yet unpublished and unseen, was widely discussed in Atlanta, because of her social connections, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that she allowed an editor to see even a part of it. Harold Latham of the Macmillan Company, however, was convinced of its worth upon reading a portion of the manuscript, and word soon spread in the publishing industry and literary communities across the country.
By the time it was published in mid-1936, Gone With the Wind was the most talked-about book in America and Mitchell was a media star. By then, producer David O. Selznick had set his sights on the story and its screen rights. His well-orchestrated ballyhoo leading up to the shooting of the film at MGM -- highlighted by a national talent search for the role of Scarlett O'Hara -- represented a new phenomenon in the selling of films, and helped make Gone With the Wind (1939) one of the most anticipated movies in history. Mitchell was, as might be gathered, an unapologetic romantic when it came to the history of the American South and the Confederate States of America -- she was the granddaughter of the generation that had fought the war's losing side. The book was taken to heart by white Southerners in love with that sanitized vision of their history, and also by readers who liked a good multi-layered romantic story with lots of character development; between them, the two groups made the novel into a pop-culture icon and touchstone. The book and the movie were also derided by those who held no romantic illusions about the South or the institution of slavery upon which the region had impaled itself. Mitchell herself was a conservative Democrat, typical of upper-class white Southerners of the period, vocally anti-Roosevelt from 1936 onward -- she found a directly opposed literary foe in leftist author Howard Fast, who wrote his post-Civil War novel Freedom Road as a counter-active to Mitchell's book.
In the South, however, at least among whites, there was no dispute about the book's power, and that went double where female readers were concerned. In a time long before modern feminism was even thought of, Mitchell and the sensibilities that she brought to the book helped to push two generations of upper-middle-class and middle-class Southern women into the 20th century, describing the conflict between their proper upbringings and their need for independence. In a broader context, she took on the role of a popular cultural heroine in the city of Atlanta, a status that lingered long after her death. On the other hand, literary scholars never treated Mitchell kindly, in part because she never published a large body of work open to analysis. Her popularity sustained her reputation, but Mitchell was never treated as seriously as, say, Erskine Caldwell, who wrote some 50 books, most of them about the South and many of them presenting a very different vision of his subject. Mitchell was a genuine one-book author. She never published or, so far as is known, even tried to publish another novel. Beyond her lack of inclination to do so, various personal and family difficulties and the distraction of the Second World War, in which she was heavily involved in the support of troops' morale, made it impossible for her to author any other fiction. On a personal level, she grew more conservative in the decade after the book's publication and subsequently took on various reactionary political positions. Although she was known for her polite relations with the black Americans with whom she had contact, she was an opponent of the early civil rights movement.
On August 16, 1949, Mitchell and her husband left their home, intending to go to a movie theater to see the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie A Canterbury Tale, when they were struck and killed by a drunk driver. In the decades since, the book's mystique has grown just as the movie has gone through multiple release cycles; about once each decade, whenever MGM needed to put a few million dollars onto its balance sheets, it could get Gone With the Wind back into theaters nationally. As late as 1970, it was still regarded as the one American feature film that would never be shown on television, a position abandoned within two years. There have also been numerous restorations and reissues on videocassette, laserdisc, and DVD. And Gone With the Wind provided the motivation for Ted Turner to purchase MGM -- all in order to own the movie -- and, thus, indirectly, became the reason behind Warner Home Video assuming control over the MGM library in the late '90s, when Turner, in turn, sold out his holdings to Time-Warner. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle, much referred to as May Belle, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.[citation needed]
Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal. Under the name Peggy Mitchell she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition, thereby making her mark as one of the first female columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.[citation needed]
Mitchell married Berrien “Red” Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger and an abusive alcoholic. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.[citation needed]
Occupation
From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his family.[citation needed]
Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.[1]
Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling book, next to the Bible, at the time of publication.[dubious– discuss][2] Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, showing Mitchell as a young woman and providing a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
Writing Gone with the Wind
Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remingtontypewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She also considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.[3]
Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed.[citation needed] She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts. The bulk of the work was written between 1925 and 1930 in an apartment Mitchell called "The Dump"[4]: the Crescent Apartments are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are operated as a museum to Mitchell's memory.
While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book. "Frankly" was added for the movie.[citation needed] Other sources report Rhett Butler may have been patterned on the life of George Trenholm. [5][6]
Publication
Mitchell lived as a modest Atlanta newspaperwoman until a visit from Macmillan editor Harold Latham, who visited Atlanta in 1935.[7] Latham was scouring the South for promising writers, and Mitchell agreed to escort him around Atlanta at the request of her friend, Lois Cole, who worked for Latham. Latham was enchanted with Mitchell, and asked her if she had ever written a book. Mitchell demurred. "Well, if you ever do write a book, please show it to me first!" Latham implored. Later that day, a friend of Mitchell, having heard this conversation, laughed. "Imagine, anyone as silly as Peggy writing a book!" she said. Mitchell stewed over this comment, went home, and found most of the old, crumbling envelopes containing her disjointed manuscript. She arrived at The Georgian Terrace Hotel, just as Latham prepared to depart Atlanta. "Here," she said, "take this before I change my mind!"[citation needed]
Latham bought an extra suitcase to accommodate the giant manuscript. When Mitchell arrived home, she was horrified over her impetuous act, and sent a telegram to Latham: "Have changed my mind. Send manuscript back."[citation needed] But Latham had read enough of the manuscript to realize it would be a blockbuster. He wrote to her of his thoughts about its potential success. MacMillan soon sent her a check in advance to encourage her to complete the novel — she had not composed a first chapter. She completed her work in March 1936.
Herschel Brickell, a famous literary critic for the New York Evening Post, reviewed Mitchell's book in an article titled " “Margaret Mitchell’s First Novel, ‘Gone With the Wind,’ a Fine Panorama of the Civil War Period.” His review helped launch Mitchell's career by calling attention to what would become one of the best novels of the Southern Renaissance. Over time, Brickell and Mitchell became extremely close; much of their correspondence has been published and is available in the archives at the University of Mississippi. Brickell was also a correspondent, friend, and adviser to other southern writers including Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, William Alexander Percy, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Stark Young and Allen Tate.[8]
Gone with the Wind was such an overnight success that its publisher George Platt Brett, President of Macmillan Publishing, gave all its employees an 18% bonus in 1936.[9]
Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street with her husband, John Marsh, on her way to see the British film A Canterbury Tale at The Peachtree Art Theatre in August 1949. She died at Grady Hospital five days later without regaining consciousness. The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver. He was driving his personal vehicle at the time, but his occupation led to many erroneous references over the years to Mitchell’s having been struck by a taxi. After the accident, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death several days later. Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge announced that the state would tighten regulations for licensing taxi drivers.[10]
Gravitt was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in prison.[11] His conviction was controversial because witnesses said Mitchell stepped into the street without looking, and her friends claimed she often did this.
Clayton County, the area just south of Atlanta and the setting for the fictional O'Hara plantation, Tara, maintains "The Road to Tara" Museum in the old railroad depot in downtown Jonesboro.
For decades it was thought that Mitchell had only ever written one complete novel. (In fact, periodically claims are made that she never wrote it at all due to the lack of any other published work by her). But in the 1990s, a manuscript by Mitchell of a novel entitled Lost Laysen was discovered among a collection of letters Mitchell had given in the early 1920s to a suitor named Henry Love Angel. The manuscript had been written in two notebooks in 1916. In the 1990s, Angel's son discovered the manuscript and sent it to the Road to Tara Museum, which authenticated the work. A special edition of Lost Laysen — a romance set in the South Pacific — was edited by Debra Freer, augmented with an account of Mitchell and Angel's romance including a number of her letters to him, and published by the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster in 1996.
Further reading
Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell New Haven: Tichnor and Fields, 1983.
Farr, Finnis. Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone With the Wind.New York: William Morrow, 1965.
Pyron, Darden Asbury. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone With the Wind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Walker, Marianne. Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1993.
^ Rosen, Robert N. Confederate Charleston: An illustrated history of the city and the people during the Civil War. University of South Carolina Press, 1994. p. 151.
^ Brickell, Amanda. “Herschel Brickell: One Critic’s Role in Promoting Southern Literature.” Final Paper for Southern Literature Class, Middlebury College
^McKitterick, David. A History of Cambridge University press Volume III: New Worlds for Learning 1873-1972. p. 308.
The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts.
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts.
