Margaret Mitchell

• 1. Introduction

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  Margaret Mitchell wrote exactly one published novel in her lifetime, and it sold a million copies in its first six months. Gone with the Wind arrived in June 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and never really left. But the woman behind it spent most of her adult life insisting she was not a serious writer. She used the unfinished manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch. Her husband had to beg her to write the thing in the first place.

  Who was Margaret Mitchell? She was an Atlanta girl who grew up listening to Confederate veterans on front porches, a debutante who got herself blacklisted from the Junior League, a journalist who covered everyone from Rudolph Valentino to Rebecca Latimer Felton. She was also a survivor of grief so layered it is hard to catalogue: a fiancé killed in France, a mother dead of influenza, a first marriage that ended in violence.

  This documentary traces the forces that shaped Mitchell and the book that outlived her. It asks why a woman who doubted her own talent produced one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century, and what the world she was born into has to do with the world she invented.

• 2. Roots in Georgia Clay

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  Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on the 8th of November, 1900, into a family whose roots ran deep into Georgia soil and Confederate memory. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney. Her mother, Mary Isabel Stephens, known as May Belle, was a suffragist and Catholic activist who had studied at the Bellevue Convent in Quebec before completing her education at the Atlanta Female Institute.

  On her father's side, the family traced its American origins to Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777 and served in the American Revolutionary War. Her grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, enlisted in the Confederate States Army on the 24th of June, 1861, served in Hood's Texas Brigade, and was severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg. After the war, he made a large fortune supplying lumber for the rebuilding of Atlanta.

  Her mother's people were Irish Catholic. Philip Fitzgerald, Mitchell's maternal great-grandfather, emigrated from Ireland and settled on a slaveholding plantation called Rural Home near Jonesboro, Georgia. His daughter Annie married John Stephens, himself an Irish immigrant who became a captain in the Confederate States Army and, after the war, a prosperous real estate developer. Stephens co-founded the Gate City Street Railroad in 1881, a mule-drawn trolley system in Atlanta.

  This is the family matrix that produced Margaret Mitchell: lawyers and soldiers, suffragists and developers, Irish Catholics in a Protestant state, people who had built Atlanta and watched it burn. Their stories would not leave her alone.

• 3. Childhood on Jackson Hill

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  When Mitchell was about three years old, her dress caught fire on an iron grate. She was unharmed, but the accident frightened her mother so deeply that May Belle began dressing her daughter in boys' pants. The child was nicknamed Jimmy, after a character in the comic strip Little Jimmy, and she kept the name until she was fourteen.

  The neighborhood she grew up in, Jackson Hill east of downtown Atlanta, was old and affluent. At its bottom sat an area of African-American homes and businesses. In September 1906, when Mitchell was five, the Atlanta Race Riot convulsed the city over four days. Local white newspapers had printed unfounded rumors that white women had been assaulted, and an angry mob of ten thousand assembled in the streets. Eugene Mitchell, who did not own a gun, stood guard with a sword. His daughter remembered the terror twenty years later.

  Confederate memory was the air she breathed. She rode every afternoon with a Confederate veteran and did not learn the South had lost the war until she was ten. The revelation hit her like a physical blow. She later recalled: "It was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant."

  At six years old, her mother took her on a buggy tour of ruined plantations and the brick and stone chimneys left behind by William Tecumseh Sherman's march. May Belle told her daughter that her own world would one day explode beneath her feet, and that she had better be armed with something when it did. Mitchell would carry that warning the rest of her life.

• 4. The Making of a Writer

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  Before she could read, Mitchell's mother read her Mary Johnston's Civil War novels aloud. They wept together over Johnston's The Long Roll, published in 1911, and its sequel Cease Firing, published in 1912. Young Margaret also read G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series. Her two favorite children's books were both by Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It, published in 1902, and The Phoenix and the Carpet, published in 1904. She kept both on her shelf as an adult and gave them as gifts.

  She started writing her own stories at an early age, beginning with animals, then progressing to fairy tales and adventure. She fashioned covers for these, bound tablet pages together, and added her own artwork. At age eleven she named her publishing enterprise the "Urchin Publishing Co." Her mother stored the manuscripts in white enamel bread boxes.

  Themes of honor and romantic love appeared early. The Knight and the Lady, written around 1909, features a duel between a good knight and a bad knight for the hand of a lady. The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden, written around 1913, sends a half-white Indian brave through ritual pain to uphold his honor. These same preoccupations, dressed in much greater sophistication, run through Lost Laysen, the novella she wrote at fifteen in 1916, and through Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926.

  At Washington Seminary, a private girls' school in Atlanta with over three hundred students, Mitchell played male characters on stage, including Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice. Her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, told her she had ability on the condition that she worked hard and never constructed a careless sentence. A sentence, Paisley said, must be "complete, concise and coherent."

• 5. Love, Loss, and the Flu

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  Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with Clifford West Henry, a Harvard graduate and army lieutenant who served as chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon. Before sailing for France on the 17th of July, he gave her an engagement ring.

  On the 14th of September, while Mitchell was enrolled at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France. He died on the 17th of October. As he waited in the Verdun trenches before being wounded, he had written a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook. The poem's final stanza ended with the phrase "Should I 'go West.'"

  Henry had drawn machine-gun fire deliberately, advancing in front of his platoon so the German positions could be located. Though wounded in the leg in that effort, he died from shrapnel from an air bomb. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme and two Distinguished Service Crosses. Mitchell's brother later said Henry was the great love of her life.

  Mitchell had harbored vague ambitions of a career in psychiatry, but grief was not her only blow that year. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed over fifty million people worldwide, reached her family on the 25th of January, 1919, when her mother, May Belle Mitchell, died of pneumonia from the Spanish flu. Mitchell arrived home from Smith College a day too late. Knowing death was close, May Belle had written her daughter a letter: "Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life." Mitchell never returned to college.

• 6. Reporter and Newlywed

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  Still legally married to her first husband, Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, a bootlegger she had married on the 2nd of September, 1922, Mitchell took a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement. The skepticism on the magazine staff was open; debutantes, she was told, were not known for showing up to work.

  Her first story appeared on the 31st of December, 1922. She wrote on a wide range of topics, from fashion to Confederate generals to King Tut. On the 1st of July, 1923, she interviewed Rudolph Valentino, describing his face as "swarthy" and his chief charm as his "low, husky voice with a soft, sibilant accent." The interview was published under the title Valentino Declares He Isn't a Sheik. She also wrote about Rebecca Latimer Felton, the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, and three other notable Georgia women in a piece called Georgia's Empress and Women Soldiers. The article drew criticism for depicting strong women who did not fit accepted standards of femininity.

  Mitchell's first marriage dissolved by December 1922. She suffered physical and emotional abuse from Upshaw, whose alcoholism and violent temper made the household untenable. The divorce was finalized on the 16th of October, 1924. Less than a year later, on the 4th of July, 1925, she married John Robert Marsh, a copy editor from Kentucky who had been Upshaw's roommate and the best man at her first wedding. The couple moved into Apartment 1 of the Crescent Apartments, which they called "The Dump."

  By the 9th of May 1926, Mitchell's journalism career was over. In less than four years she had written 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.

• 7. Writing Gone with the Wind

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  Mitchell left the Atlanta Journal because an ankle injury would not heal. Confined to the apartment and running through stacks of library books, she finally heard her husband's exasperated plea: "For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?" John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter, and Mitchell went to work.

  For the next three years she worked exclusively on a Civil War novel whose heroine she had named Pansy O'Hara. Parts of the manuscript served as a doorstop under a wobbly couch. The character's name was changed to Scarlett before publication.

  In April 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan, an editor actively hunting new fiction, read her manuscript and recognized it as a potential best-seller. After Latham agreed to publish the book, Mitchell spent another six months verifying historical references and rewriting the opening chapter repeatedly. She and John Marsh edited the final version together.

  Gone with the Wind appeared in June 1936. It won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. The Lost Laysen novella Mitchell had written at fifteen in 1916 had been given to a boyfriend named Henry Love Angel. He died in 1945, and the notebooks sat undiscovered until 1994. When they were published in 1996, eighty years after Mitchell had written them, Lost Laysen became a New York Times Best Seller.

• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  During World War II, Mitchell volunteered for the American Red Cross, sold war bonds, sewed hospital gowns, and wrote personal letters to soldiers, sailors, and marines. She also sponsored two United States Navy light cruisers named after Atlanta. The first, USS Atlanta (CL-51), fought in the naval Battle of Midway and the Battle of Guadalcanal before being heavily damaged on the 13th of November, 1942, and scuttled. It had earned five battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation.

  Mitchell christened the second USS Atlanta (CL-104) in Camden, New Jersey on the 6th of February, 1944. That ship was operating off the coast of Honshu when Japan surrendered on the 15th of August, 1945. It earned two battle stars before being sunk during explosive testing off San Clemente Island on the 1st of October, 1970.

  On the evening of the 11th of August, 1949, Mitchell and her husband John Marsh crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta on their way to see the film A Canterbury Tale. An off-duty taxi driver named Hugh Gravitt, later found to have been driving drunk on the wrong side of the road, struck her. She died at Grady Hospital five days later, on the 16th of August, 1949, at the age of 48, without fully regaining consciousness. Gravitt was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail; he served almost 11 months.

  When Mitchell's nephew Joseph Mitchell died in 2011, he left fifty percent of the trademark and literary rights of the Margaret Mitchell Estate to the Archdiocese of Atlanta, a bequest that connects the end of her story to the Irish Catholic roots her family carried from Ireland to Georgia more than a century before.