Margaret Mitchell Biography and List of Works

American author of the enormously popular novel GONE WITH WIND (1936), the story of the American Civil War and Reconstruction as seen from the Southern point of view. The book was adapted to the highly popular film in 1939, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. At the novel's opening in 1861, Scarlett O'Hara is sixteen-year-old girl. In the twelve-year span of the story she experiences Secession, Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as romance, love, marriage, and motherhood.

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with briskly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin - that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia sun."
(from Gone With the Wind)

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta. Her mother was a suffragist and father a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the Confederate Army had fought there during the American Civil War. She graduated from the local Washington Seminary and started in 1918 to study medicine at Smith College. In her youth Mitchell adopted her mother's feminist leanings, which clashed with her father's conservatism - but she lived fully the wild times of the Jazz age and wrote about them in non-fiction.

When Mitchell's mother died in 1919, she returned to home to keep house for her father and brother. In 1922 she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. The disastrous marriage was climaxed by spousal rape and was annulled 1924. Mitchell started her career as a journalist in 1922 under the name Peggy Mitchell, writing for the Atlanta Journal. Four years later she resigned after an ankle injury. Her second husband, John Robert Marsh, an advertising manager, encouraged Mitchell in her writing aspirations. From 1926 to 1929 she wrote Gone With the Wind, dressing in boys' trousers while writing and combining stories of Civil War heard in childhood to historical material. The outcome, a thousand-page novel, was not published until 1935 when she first showed it to a travelling book editor, who visited Atlanta in search of new material. The work broke sales records and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937.

Although Gone with the Wind brought Mitchell fame and tremendous fortune, it seems to have brought little joy. Chased by the press and public, the author and her husband lived modestly and travelled rarely. Also questions about the book's literary status, melodrama and racism led to critical neglect that continued well in the 1960s. The story is told from a Southern woman's point of view and paints a vivid picture of Southern life through the lives of two families, and their slaves, friends, and relatives.

"Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them."
(from Gone With the Wind)

During World War II Mitchell was a volunteer selling war bonds and volunteer for the American Red Cross. She was named honorary citizen of Vimoutiers, France, in 1949, for helping the city obtain American aid after WW II. Mitchell died in Atlanta on August 16, 1949 - she was accidentally struck by a speeding car. Authorized sequel for Gone with the Wind, entitled Scarlett and written by Alexandra Ripley, appeared in 1992. In the story Scarlett journeys to Ireland with her children and there meets Rhett Butler again. LOST LAYSEN, a lost novella by Mitchell, written when she was 16, and given to her close friend, was published in 1995. The romantic story is set on a South Pacific island.

For further reading: Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of 'Gone With the Wind' by Finis Farr (1965); The Road to Tara by Anne Edwards (1983); Gone With the Wind as Book and Film, ed. by Richard Harwell (1983); I Remember Margaret Mitchell by Yolande Gwin (1986); Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans by Helen Taylor(1989); Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell by Darden Asbury Pyron (1991); Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story behind Gone with the Wind by Marianne Walker (1993); 'Frankly, My Dear...' : Gone With the Wind Memorabilia by Herb Bridges (1995); The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind by David O'Connell (1996)

GONE WITH WIND, (1936)
MARGARET MITCHELL'S "GONE WITH THE WIND" LETTERS, (1976)
MARGARET MITCHELL, A DYNAMO GOING TO WASTE: LETTERS TO A. EDEE, (1919)
LOST LAYSEN, (1995)