Author Profile: Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell

BIO

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 1900.  She entered Smith College in 1918, but left a year later to take care of her father and brother after her mother passed away.

In 1922 she marred Berrien Upshaw, but the marriage lasted only a few years.  In that same year, she became a reporter for The Atlanta Journal.  There she met John Marsh, whom she married in 1924.

An injury to her foot in 1926 required her to leave her job at the newspaper.  While she was convalescing, she began working on GONE WITH THE WIND, typing on a portable typewriter balanced on her lap.

She told no one except her husband about the novel she was writing, and she never expected it to be published.  She stuffed finished chapters in manila envelopes and hid them under the sofa, the bed and any other place she could find in her small house.

One day, Lois Cole --- a friend of hers who worked for Macmillan Publishing in New York --- told her boss, Harold Latham, about Margaret's book.  Latham went to Atlanta and met with her, but she denied that she was writing a book.  Just before Latham was to return to New York, she had a change of heart.  She stuffed the envelopes into a suitcase, took them to his hotel and gave them to him saying, "Take it before I change my mind."

The book was published on June 30, 1936.  Although the reviews were mixed, one-half million copies of it were sold in the six months after its publication.  It was a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club in July 1936.  In May 1937 Margaret Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for GONE WITH THE WIND.  A few years later the movie was made into a motion picture starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.

On August 11, 1949, while crossing a street in downtown Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was hit by a speeding taxi.  She died five days later.

ARTICLE

Writers of the Century ---
Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell may have written only one major novel in her career, but then again, so did another Southern writer, Harper Lee. GONE WITH THE WIND, like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, is a masterpiece of literature.To some, GONE WITH THE WIND screams schmaltzy romance.These same people often believe Margaret Mitchell was simply a southern belle who got lucky writing about beaus and war. Not true. Margaret was a beauty --- like her infamous character Scarlett --- and like Scarlett, she was a very curious, smart, and clever woman who shocked the world with her three and a half pound novel.

Born on November 8, 1900 in Atlanta, the young Margaret --- whom her friends called Peggy --- was fascinated with the stories she would hear from her relatives about the Civil War. So caught up in these historical daydreams, at one point Margaret wanted to leave school. Her horrified mother dragged Margaret to the rural road where the old plantation houses were left in ruin. Chastened at this blatant look of destruction, Margaret returned to school and entered Smith college in 1918, not long after the United States entered World War I. After her fiancee was killed in action and her mother died from a flu epidemic, Margaret left college to take care of her brother and father in Atlanta. She sounds a little like Scarlett already, strong and dedicated to her family and her home.

Although she did enter society in 1920, Margaret was too free-spirited and intelligent to be satisfied with life as a debutante. She quarreled with her fellow debutantes over the distribution of the money they had raised for charity and shocked society with a provocative dance she performed with one of her suitors.

Margaret was no meek Melanie that's for sure --- she was a strong woman not about to let societal rules dictate her behavior or control her life. She lived fully and at times rashly, juggling beaus. A novella was just published in 1997 called LOST LAYDEN, a book that combines two notebooks of Margaret's and tells the story of her love affair with Henry Love Angel, in letters and photographs. It was written when Margaret was only sixteen. When Margaret was twenty-two she finally married one of her suitors, Berrien Upshaw. After they married Margaret took a job as a writer for The Atlanta Journal where her other beau, John Marsh was an editor. Can you see where this is heading? The excitement seeking flapper loved working for the paper --- even more than she loved her marriage, so after a stormy two years she divorced Upshaw in 1924. Less than a year later, married Marsh. Only a few months after her marriage, Margaret had to leave her job to recover after a series of injuries. This proved to be the catalyst she needed to begin her other career.

While recovering, Margaret --- who could never be still for long --- began writing the book that would make her famous.  The ball started rolling after the book was published in 1936. It was almost instantly a bestseller, and she won the Pulitzer Prize only a year later in 1937. The movie followed quickly, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable setting in stone, or well, film, the epic of GONE WITH THE WIND, and essentially making Margaret Mitchell a household name.

Margaret lived to the fullest, looking for passion and love --- never stopping to ask permission or dutifully submitting to anyone's will but her own. She was certainly ahead of her time, a female bestseller who was, gulp, divorced. It is not simply her epic novel that delights and inspires generations of readers, but also her own personality, that shines through in and beyond GONE WITH THE WIND. There is a reason for the cult following --- everyone who has read the book has a story to go along with it, including me.

I was 13 when my mother gave me her battered copy of GONE WITH THE WIND.  She had purchased it in a secondhand bookstore on some hidden military base in Bangkok, Thailand. I was impressed by its age and by the fact that my mother had held onto this volume through her many moves to and throughout the United States.

Her eyes sparkled when she told me about Scarlett's scandalous flirtations and her will to survive. I was intrigued by my mother's attachment to GONE WITH THE WIND because she never read novels and generally considered them fluff.  But something about this book captivated her. My mother, the realist, was under Scarlett's spell.

I quickly became as enchanted with this novel as my mother was. Her tattered copy has never left my possession and it remains my bedside book of choice. Ten years later, I still read it frequently and often crack it open to the description of the barbecue or to the detailed catalog of Scarlett's summer wardrobe. Even fellow readers and lovers of GONE WITH THE WIND look at me strangely when I explain my desire to reread the book over and over. They don't understand. The familiarity and comfort this novel gives me is nothing I can articulate.

When I'm feeling anxious, I go to my shabby volume and open it up to any page and read for as long as I need to. This simple practice has put my mind at ease when the stress and pressure of graduate school gets to be too much. GONE WITH THE WIND is the perfect salve for my chafed brain when I get impatient with American Modernism or the New Critics become tiresome. Tara, is a home of sorts to me, as it was to Gerald O'Hara and his family.

Because I read GONE WITH THE WIND as a young girl first experiencing puberty and the maddening behavior of the opposite sex, Scarlett served as a role model for me. Margaret Mitchell cleverly de-emphasized Scarlett's conformity to the traditional beauty of the time. She was not beautiful, according to Mitchell and the standards of the Civil War South, but there was something about Scarlett that appealed to men and women. At 13, I was hardly beautiful or charismatic --- I knew that --- but I thought that maybe I would eventually have that something special. Maybe when I was 16 or 17, something inside of me would emerge and charm everyone. To a 13-year-old girl, already willingly caught up in the excitement of romance and adventure of literature, Scarlett O'Hara was the ultimate role model.

I have found excitement, and, at times, what I thought was true love. The excitement was fleeting and the love flickered and burned itself out time after time, but Scarlett and Tara still shine. No amount of time or cynicism will tarnish the gleam of their story. It continues to thrill both me and the devoted readers who have also developed relationships with the characters in GONE WITH THE WIND. I don't often thank my mother for everything she does for me, but I must remember to thank her for her copy of this book. I am certain that it will remain my bedside book of choice, a welcome rest for my heart and soul, until I am forced to listen to it on audio.

--- Lynn Ramsson