Mitchell, Margaret (1900-1949)

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Mitchell, Margaret (1900-1949)

Atlanta-born author Margaret Mitchell was an unknown in 1936 when her novel Gone with the Wind hit bookshelves across the country. The phenomenal success of Gone with the Wind altered her life dramatically. Mitchell's publishers, Macmillan, were convinced that they had a hit on their hands, so convinced that they invested more than $10,000 promoting the novel. But even they were unprepared for sales that numbered more than half a million in a scant three months and more than two million by the time the book ended its 21-month run on the bestseller list. These figures are rendered even more astounding when one recalls what the $3 cost of Gone with the Wind represented to many Depression-plagued consumers.

Certainly Mitchell's chronicle of the American Civil War and its aftermath offers compelling material. Additionally, contemporary audiences may have seen themselves reflected in Mitchell's tale of devastation and struggle, and Scarlett's vow to never go hungry again resonated with audiences who knew the reality of her hunger. Neither explanation, however, serves to account for the sustained popularity of a book that continues to sell close to 300,000 copies a year more than six decades after its publication.

Critics and ordinary readers alike praised the authenticity of Mitchell's work. Even the harshest critic noted, sometimes reluctantly, the author's powerful storytelling and historical accuracy. The reaction of readers, from university professors to laborers, was more visceral; the dramatic background and the vivid characterization engaged readers' emotions as well as their attention. Neither critics nor readers, however, realized the immediacy the Civil War experience held for Margaret Mitchell: she had played on land where relics from Sherman's siege could be picked up by curious children, and she had traced with her own fingers the bullet scars, souvenirs of Antietam, on her Grandfather Mitchell's head. Mitchell's South was a storied land where an oral tradition was still strong. Like Faulkner, she knew that the past is never truly past.

But Mitchell had no desire to create a sentimental tribute to the glories of the Old South. The daughter of a suffragist mother and a history-buff father, she was too much of a rebel and too aware of the realities of Southern experience to belong to the moonlight and magnolias school. She had proved herself willing to challenge aristocratic Southern sensibilities long before she began writing Gone with the Wind. She scandalized polite Atlanta during her debut year with her public declaration that she would seek work rather than be auctioned off in marriage. No less shocking to her genteel world was the job she did secure writing for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, especially since by the time Peggy Mitchell's byline was appearing, she was the wife of Berrien "Red" Upshaw.

Mitchell's Atlanta Journal pieces were standard fare for the magazine's largely female readers; fairs, faith, and fashion were frequent topics. But in these articles Mitchell honed her gift for capturing memorable characters and evocative details, skills she would use to powerful effect in Gone with the Wind. Her Sunday features also reveal an avid interest in strong-willed women, particularly those who struggled to achieve financial independence. Mitchell wrote for the Atlanta Journal for four years, the period of her brief marriage to Upshaw and her years of independence following their divorce. Beset by ill health and frustrated with the limits of journalism, she left the Atlanta Journal in 1926, shortly after her marriage to John Marsh.

Soon thereafter she began the manuscript that would become Gone with the Wind. Obsessed with privacy, Mitchell hid her writing even from close friends. Because of her secrecy and because her family, honoring her wishes, destroyed most of her papers after her death, little is known about the composition of the novel. We do know that the final chapter was the first written, and the heroine's name was originally Pansy Hamilton. The change to Scarlett O'Hara came only a few months before publication.

While Mitchell was waffling on her character's name, Hollywood was already pursuing film rights to the novel. Major studios competed for rights, but David O. Selznick—an independent producer—won with an offer of $50,000, an impressive sum at the time. It soon became clear that Selznick's romanticized vision of the South was quite different from Margaret Mitchell's rawer, more diverse, and less pretentious reality. Her aristocrats, the Wilkes clan, are the blandest characters in the 1,037 page novel. The strongest, most colorful characters do not fit popular, sentimental images. Mitchell insists that Scarlett is her father's daughter, and Gerald O'Hara is an Irish immigrant with only the thinnest veneer of gentility. The rogue Rhett Butler, far from playing the Cavalier, left genteel Charleston, disgusted with its hypocrisies.

Selznick simplified Scarlett's complexity and ignored the issue of mother-daughter relationships that figures prominently in the novel. His concern was with the romance of the characters and the region, and for those who saw his 1939 film, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable became Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. The white-columned, plantation South of the film became the backdrop for Gone with the Wind, however false it may have been to Mitchell's novel. Few people even realize that the words that roll across the screen paying tribute to the "land of Cavaliers" and the last bow of the "Age of Chivalry" are a Hollywood addition which made Mitchell cringe.

Margaret Mitchell died in Atlanta on August 16, 1949, the victim of a speeding car. She was aware in the years before her death that the critical reputation of her epic work was declining, a decline that only intensified as the South itself changed radically. Gone with the Wind became an embarrassment to a region and a nation confronting its racist heritage. But even as critics first attacked and later ignored Mitchell's novel, Gone with the Wind survived. More than half a century after Margaret Mitchell wrote the novel which has become synonymous with her name, it continues to sell. In addition, Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind sites proliferate on the world wide web, and scholars once again examine the literary value of Mitchell's opus.

Flannery O'Connor, another Georgia writer, once said, "There is something in us, as storytellers and listeners to stories … that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored." Mitchell wrote of a character and a place that believed in that chance. Perhaps therein lies the success of Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind.

—Wylene Rholetter