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Margaret Mitchell
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Margaret Mitchell
American novelist
in full Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
born November 8, 1900, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
died August 16, 1949, Atlanta
Main
American author of the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind.
Mitchell attended Washington Seminary in her native Atlanta, Georgia,
before enrolling at Smith College in 1918. When her mother died the next
year, she returned home. Between 1922 and 1926 she was a writer and
reporter for the Atlanta Journal. After an ankle injury in 1926, she
left the paper and for the next 10 years worked slowly on a romantic
novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction as seen from a Southern
point of view. The novel featured Scarlett O’Hara, a strong-willed
coquette and jezebel. From her family Mitchell had absorbed the history
of the South, the tragedy of the war, and the romance of the Lost Cause.
She worked at her novel sporadically, composing episodes out of sequence
and later fitting them together. She apparently had little thought of
publication at first, and for six years after it was substantially
finished the novel lay unread. But in 1935 Mitchell was persuaded to
submit her manuscript for publication.
It appeared in 1936 as Gone with the Wind (quoting a line from the
poem “Cynara” by Ernest Dowson). Within six months 1,000,000 copies had
been sold; 50,000 copies were sold in one day. It went on to sell more
copies than any other novel in U.S. publishing history, with sales
passing 12,000,000 by 1965, and was eventually translated into some 25
languages and sold in about 40 countries. It was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize in 1937. The motion-picture rights were sold for $50,000. The
film, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and produced by David O.
Selznick, premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, after an
unprecedented period of advance promotion, including the highly
publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett. It won eight major
Oscars and two special Oscars at the Academy Awards and for two decades
reigned as the top moneymaking film of all time. Mitchell, who never
adjusted to the celebrity that had befallen her and who never attempted
another book, died after an automobile accident in 1949. Four decades
after Mitchell’s death, her estate permitted the writing of a sequel by
Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with
the Wind” (1991), which was generally unfavourably appraised by critics.
In 2001 Mitchell’s estate, citing copyright infringement, sued to block
the publication of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parodic
sequel to Gone with the Wind told from a former slave’s perspective.
Later that year the case was settled out of court. Mitchell’s estate
eventually authorized a second sequel, Rhett Butler’s People (2007),
which was written by historical novelist Donald McCaig.
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Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
1900 -1949
Gone With the Wind's romanticized setting in Civil War and
Reconstruction-era Georgia, as well as its central characters,
the fiery Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara and her dashing husband
Rhett Butler, have become the stuff of American mythology.
Although David 0. Selznick's 1939 film helped to immortalize
Mitchell's novel, the book had already enjoyed phenomenal sales
upon first publication and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, a
year later, in 1937.
A sweeping historical saga, it follows Scarlett and her friends
and relatives through a period of major upheaval in American
social and economic history. The novel traces the transition
from the agricultural society of the early 1860s, represented by
Tara, the family plantation, to the beginnings of Southern
industrialization in the 1880s. While it is famously a tale
about Scarlett, Rhett, and Ashley's love triangle, Gone With the
Wind is also a love letter to a place, the city of Atlanta,
Georgia. Mitchell was born in Atlanta and grew up hearing
stories of the antebellum city and the battles fought by the
Confederate army. She lovingly details Atlanta's expanding and
changing society in passages that reveal the extent of her
historical research. However, Gone With the Wind is not an
uncontroversial novel, and Margaret Mitchell's own sympathies
with Southern slave owners and idyllic portrayal of pre¬war
plantation society have exposed the book to an expansive
cultural debate, producing critical analysis, protest, and even
parody that continues today. Nevertheless, it remains an
ambitious, gripping novel, and, far more importantly, an
undisputed cultural phenomenon that not only helped to shape the
direction of the American novel, but that has had a significant
effect on America's popular conception of its own history.
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