Margaret Mitchell --Gone with the Wind

[Keesyy]

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• Margaret Mitchell
  Category: Writing and Poetry
  Margaret Mitchell
   
• Ok i know this is the longest blog i have done..lol...it took two for me to do it...but here goes....i love this woman with all my heart and i never got to meet her..she was just awsome but then again how many people can u say touched ur life
  1.after they have died before u were born and 2.u never met them....well i have to say it happend to me...i just loved this woman and wanted u to know her as well as i hope i do......the first of this is her obiturary and the second is the wikipedia version of her life and accomplishments...enjoy!!!
  August 17, 1949
  OBITUARY
  Miss Mitchell, 49, Dead of Injuries
  Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
  ATLANTA, Aug. 16--Margaret Mitchell, author of "Gone With the Wind," died today at Grady Hospital of injuries received when she was struck down by a speeding automobile on Peachtree Street last Thursday.
  Not once since the accident had the 49-year-old Miss Mitchell fully regained consciousness, according to hospital attaches. At infrequent intervals, she had murmured vague, incoherent responses to spoken questions.
  Shortly after Miss Mitchell died, the driver of the auto which struck her surrendered voluntarily to police and Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins said an "immediate murder indictment" would be sought. Hugh D. Gravitt, 29, the driver, had been out on bond of $5,450, after having been arrested at the scene of the accident and charged with drunken driving, speeding and driving on the wrong side of the street.
  Gravitt, an Atlanta taxi driver, was off duty and driving a private car when Miss Mitchell was struck as she and her husband, John R. Marsh, were crossing Peachtree at Thirteenth Street on the way to a neighborhood movie. Mr. Marsh was the "J.R.M." to whom "Gone With the Wind" was dedicated.
  Skull and Pelvis Fractured
  Physicians said X-rays revealed Miss Mitchell's skull was fractured from the top of her head to the top of the spine and that her pelvis was fractured in two places.
  Miss Mitchell suffered a sudden sinking spell shortly after 11 A. M. today. Three physicians were in attendance when death came at 11:59.
  Gov. Herman Talmadge ordered the flag over the State Capitol lowered to half-staff until after the funeral.
  The Governor also announced the state would act to tighten regulations in the licensing of taxi drivers. The driver of the car which killed Miss Mitchell had twenty-three previous traffic violations on police records.
  A private funeral service will be held at 10 A. M. Thursday at Spring Hill, Atlanta funeral home, with Dean Raimundo de Ovies of St. Philip's Cathedral, Atlanta, officiating. Burial will be in Oakland Cemetery here.
  Besides her husband Miss Mitchell leaves a brother, Stephens Mitchell, and two nephews, Eugene and Joseph Mitchell of Atlanta.
  A Housewife in Atlanta
  Margaret Mitchell was an Atlanta housewife, a former newspaper woman, when she showed a suitcase full of manuscript to a talent scout for the Macmillan Company in 1935. The publication, the next June, of her 1,037-page novel of the South in reconstruction days, "Gone With the Wind," made her an international personage.
  The fame which came with her book brought her an estimated $1,000,000 in book royalties, movie payments and other allied returns in less than four years, but disrupted her way of living. She said one day, in a fit of exasperation as she left for a mountain hideaway from the throngs which besieged her by telephone, telegraph and in person, that she had determined never to write another word as long as she lived.
  The novel, her first, was such a phenomenal success, its characters so gripped the imagination of the book's readers, that it might almost be labeled a Frankenstein which overwhelmed its maker. She was almost lost in the confusion which greeted the premiere of the movie of her book in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 1939.
  Miss Mitchell in private life was Mrs. John R. Marsh, wife of the retired advertising manager of the Georgia Power Company. She was born in Atlanta soon after the turn of the century, the daughter of a lawyer. The family was descended from the Huguenot settlers of South Carolina.
  Father Headed Bar Group
  Her father, the late Eugene M. Mitchell, was an attorney and former president of the Atlanta Bar Association, former president of the Atlanta Historical Society and a recognized authority on Atlanta and Georgia history.
  Her mother was the late Maybelle Stephens Mitchell. She had one brother, Stephens Mitchell, also an attorney, editor of the Atlanta Historical Society Bulletin, former president of the Atlanta Bar Association and of the Atlanta Lawyers Club. Her family has been living in or near Atlanta since before the town originated.
  She attended the Atlanta public schools, was graduated from Washington Seminary, an Atlanta preparatory school, and attended Smith College at Northampton, Mass., for about a year, leaving because of the death of her mother. She made her society debut in Atlanta.
  Miss Mitchell became a member of the staff of The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine in 1922 and worked there until 1926, writing under the name of Peggy Mitchell. She was forced to abandon this position, however, because of an injured ankle. It was then that she began writing her famous novel, "Gone With the Wind." She had been married the year before.
  Miss Mitchell was familiar with stories of the Old South, of the burning of Atlanta by Sherman on his march to the sea, of the dreary days of reconstruction. She once said that she was 10 years old before she learned that Robert E. Lee did not win the Civil War.
  The stories her father told, those she heard from Negro servants, from relatives and from friends finally began to form into a novel in her mind. With her marriage and her injured ankle making her life sedentary, she began to write.
  When she was a reporter on The Journal, she said, she always had trouble framing the opening paragraphs to her stories, so she always wrote the last part first.
  "You can imagine how my city editor loved me," she explained.
  So, when she started her book, she wrote the last chapter and then started working back from there.
  In her Atlanta apartment the manuscript piled up for nine years. Some of it was typewritten, some of it was scribbled on the backs of laundry lists. It was in desks, bureau drawers and on closet shelves. Friends had read parts of it, but she had never shown it to a publisher.
  In the fall of 1935 H. S. Latham, a vice president of the Macmillan Company, made a trip through the South looking for new authors. He had luncheon in Atlanta with Miss Mitchell and Mrs. Medora Perkerson, who also had worked on The Journal. They were suggesting writers he should see. Finally, he recalled later, Mrs. Perkerson said to him, "Peggy has written a book."
  Miss Mitchell was bashful about it, waved the suggestion aside, said the book wasn't finished. They went driving to look at the dogwood.
  She Changed Her Mind
  That night, after he had returned to his hotel, Miss Mitchell went to see him. She had changed her mind after going home, had gathered her manuscript together and had taken it down to him. He had to buy a new suitcase to hold it.
  A few days later he wired Miss Mitchell that his company had accepted the book for publication, subject to some revision. For six months she labored at the job of rewriting, editing, pulling the threads of the story together.
  "Gone With the Wind" went on the bookstands June 30, 1936. She had hoped for a sale of 5,000 copies. On one day that summer it sold 50,000.
  Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler became national characters, and then international. In two years the book was translated and printed in sixteen foreign languages. The sales passed 500,000, then a million, then a million and a half, and on up. David O. Selznick paid her $50,000 for the movie rights and spent several millions making the picture. The question of who would play Scarlett and Rhett and the other characters was discussed all over the world.
  Early in 1949 it was announced that 8,000,000 copies of the book had been sold in thirty languages in forty countries, and that 50,000 copies were still being sold yearly in the United States. The motion-picture version, with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, became America's most popular movie and was shown throughout the country to big audiences in 1947 for the fourth time.
  Won 1937 Pulitzer Prize
  The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Miss Mitchell received an honorary degree from Smith College, medals and decorations, and was besieged for her autograph and the story of her life. Two years after the book was published, when she granted her first formal interview to New York reporters, she was asked if she was writing anything else, or intended to. She said she had been so busy answering the phone, the doorbell and her fan mail that she had not had time. A Danish bookseller gave a trip to Atlanta to the winner of a raffle. She was impersonated all over the country and in Europe. Rumors about her and her mode of life were as thick, and as unpredictable, as bees in a clover patch.
  When, in 1943, Gov. Ellis Arnall of Georgia wanted to appoint her to the State Board of Education, Miss Mitchell declined the appointment in a letter in which she wrote, "My time is not my own. It has not been my own since 'Gone With the Wind' was published. The very fact that since 1936 I have never had the time to sit down to my typewriter and write--or try to write--another book will give you some indication of what I mean."
  She added that "being the author of 'Gone With the Wind' is a full-time job, and most days it is an overtime job filling engagements and meeting visitors. In addition, I am giving all the time I can to war activities and future commitments in this field which will take me out of the city."
  Asked about her ambitions at the height of the fame of "Gone With the Wind" she said that she hoped to put on weight, become "fat and amiable," grow old gracefully.
  The criticism which greeted her book was not all in praise, although much of it was lavish. Whatever posterity may decide as to its merits, Miss Mitchell wrote a book which was the most phenomenal best seller ever written by an unknown author of a first novel.
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  August 19, 2009 - Wednesday 
   Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
  Current mood:  accomplished
  Category: Writing and Poetry
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•    Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
  Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American author, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her novel Gone with the Wind. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 30 million copies (see list of best-selling books). An American film adaptation, released in 1939, became the highest-grossing film in the history of Hollywood, and received a record-breaking ten Academy Awards. Its record of eight non-honorary Academy Awards stood until 1958.
  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]
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew during her freshman year in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
  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.
  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.
• [edit] 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 Remington typewriter. 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",[citation needed] which Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book. ("Frankly" was added for the movie.)
• [edit] Publication
  Mitchell lived as a modest Atlanta newspaperwoman until a visit from Macmillan editor Harold Latham, who visited Atlanta in 1935.[5] 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.[6]
  Gone With the Wind was published on June 30, 1936. The book was dramatized by David O. Selznick, and released three years later. The premiere of the film was held in Atlanta on December 15, 1939.
  "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.[7]
• Death
   
  Mitchell's grave in Oakland Cemetery in AtlantaMitchell 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. Gravitt had been out on $5,450 bond, having been arrested for drunken driving. This incident prompted Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge to announce that the state would tighten regulations for licensing taxi drivers.[8]
  Gravitt was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in prison.[9] His conviction was controversial because witnesses said Mitchell stepped into the street without looking, and her friends claimed she often did this.
  She was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.
  The house where Mitchell lived while writing her manuscript is known today as The Margaret Mitchell House and located in Midtown Atlanta. A museum dedicated to Gone with the Wind lies a few miles north of Atlanta, in Marietta, Georgia. It is called "Scarlett On the Square", as it is located on the historic Marietta Square. It houses costumes from the film, screenplays, and many artifacts from Gone With the Wind including Mitchell's collection of foreign editions of her book. The house and the museum are major tourist destinations. The 1994 TV movie A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story, starring Shannen Doherty, told the story of Mitchell's professional and personal life through the time of the publication of "Gone With the Wind."
  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.