Margaret Mitchell was born in
Atlanta, Georgia, in 1900.
Her father was a lawyer and the president of the Atlanta Historical
Society, and her mother was a suffragette (a woman in support of extending
the right to vote, especially to women) and an advocate of women’s
rights in general. Mitchell grew up listening to stories about Atlanta
during the Civil War, stories often told by people who had lived
through the war. Mitchell attended Smith College, a women’s college
in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1919,
she returned to Atlanta and began to live a lifestyle considered
wild by the standards of the 1920s.
After a disastrous first marriage, Mitchell began a career as a
journalist and married an advertising executive named John Robert
Marsh. In 1926, encouraged
by her husband, Mitchell began to write the novel that would become Gone
with the Wind. She went through nine complete drafts of
the thousand-page work, setting an epic romance against the Civil
War background she knew so well. In the first eight drafts, the
protagonist was called Prissy Hamilton, not Scarlett O’Hara (as the
character was renamed in the final draft).
Gone with the Wind differs from most
Civil War novels by glorifying the South and demonizing the North.
Other popular novels about the Civil War, such as Stephen Crane’s The
Red Badge of Courage, are told from a Northern perspective
and tend to exalt the North’s values. Mitchell’s novel is unique
also for its portrayal of a strong-willed, independent woman, Scarlett
O’Hara, who shares many characteristics with Mitchell herself. Mitchell
frequently defied convention, divorcing her first husband and pursuing
a career in journalism despite the disapproval of society.
Gone with the Wind was published in 1936,
ten years after Mitchell began writing it. A smash success upon
publication, Gone with the Wind became—and remains
even now—one of the best-selling novels of all time. It received
the 1937 Pulitzer
Prize. In the late 1930s
a film version of the novel was planned, and David O. Selznick’s
nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara captivated
the nation’s attention. The resulting film starred Vivien Leigh
and Clark Gable as Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, and it quickly
became one of the most popular motion pictures of all time.
Mitchell was less than thrilled by the sweeping popularity
of her work. She found the spotlight uncomfortable and grew exhausted and
ill. Gone with the Wind is her only novel, though
she continued to write nonfiction. Mitchell volunteered extensively
during World War II and seemed to regain her strength. In 1949 a
car struck and killed Mitchell while she was crossing Peachtree
Street in Atlanta.
Many critics question the literary merit and outdated
racial stances of Gone with the Wind. Some consider
the novel fluffy, partly because women of Mitchell’s time rarely
received credit for serious literary fiction and partly because
the novel features a romance along with its historical plot. Both
blacks and whites have harshly criticized Mitchell’s sympathetic
depiction of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan and her racist depiction
of blacks. The novel is most valuable if read with an understanding
of three historical contexts: our own, Mitchell’s, and Scarlett’s.
