Margaret Mitchell . The creator of the famous work that gave rise to the anthology film Gone with the Wind, which was a resounding success, both as a literary work and as a film. It was translated into all languages, including Braille.
Biographical Summary
Childhood and Youth
Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta , United States of America on November 8, 1900 , to a lawyer on his father’s side, who served as President of the local Historical Society, and to an Irish Catholic on her mother’s side.
Margaret Mitchell spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a bright red Victorian house with yellow trim. Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years before Margaret was born; Captain John Stephens died in 1896. After his death, she inherited the property on Jackson Street where the family lived.
Grandma Annie Stephens was quite the character, both vulgar and a tyrant. After gaining control of her father Philip Fitzgerald’s money after he died, she squandered it on her younger daughters, including Margaret’s mother, and sent them to finish school in the North. There they learned that Irish Americans were not treated as equals to other immigrants, and that it was a disgrace to be the daughter of an Irishman. Margaret’s relationship with her grandmother would become quarrelsome in later years as she entered adulthood. However, for Margaret, her grandmother was a great source of “eyewitness information” about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta before her death in 1934.
Nicknamed Jimmy
In an accident that was traumatic for her mother even though she was uninjured, when little Margaret was about three years old, her dress caught fire on an iron fence. Fearing it would happen again, her mother began dressing her in boys’ pants, and she was nicknamed “Jimmy,” named after a character in the comic strip, Little Jimmy. Her brother insisted that it would have to be a boy named Jimmy to play with him. Having no sisters to play with, Margaret claimed that it was a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen.
Stephens Mitchell said her sister was a tomboy who would love to play with dolls occasionally, and liked to ride her Texas plains pony. Margaret was raised in an era when boys were “seen but not heard.” She was not allowed to express her personality by running and yelling on Sunday afternoons while her family was visiting relatives.
Her mother would swat her with a brush or a slipper as a form of discipline. May Belle Mitchell was “hissing blood-curdling threats” at her daughter to get her to behave the night she took her to the women’s suffrage rally led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Margaret sat on a platform carrying a Votes-for-Women flag blowing kisses to the gentlemen while her mother gave her an impassioned speech. She was nineteen when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, which gave women the right to vote.
The South (of your imagination)
While “the South” exists as a geographic region of the United States, it is also said to exist as “a place of the imagination” of writers. An image of “the South” became fixed in Mitchell’s imagination when at age six her mother took her on a buggy ride past the ruined plantations and “Sherman’s sentinels,” the brick and stone chimneys left after William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march and torch” through Georgia. Mitchell would later recall what her mother had told her:
“She talked about the world those people had lived in, a world so safe, and how it had exploded out from under them. And she said my world was going to explode out from under me, someday, and God help me if I didn’t have some weapon to meet the new world.” From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell’s defensive weapon became her writing. Mitchell said she heard stories of the Civil War from her relatives as a child: On Sunday afternoons when we called on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the sixties, we sat on the bony knees of veterans and the slippery fat laps of great-aunts and listened to them talk. On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen (“Mamie”) Fitzgerald and Sarah (“Sis”) Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents’ plantation home in Jonesboro. Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Si was thirteen when the Civil War began.
Avid reader
An avid reader, young Margaret read “Boys’ Stories” by G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series by Edward Stratemeyer . Her mother read Mary Johnston novels to her before she could read. They both cried reading Johnston’s The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Fire (1912). Among the “cry of shells, the mighty onslaught of charges, the grim and gruesome aftermath of war,” Cease Fire is a romantic novel involving the courtship of a Confederate soldier and a Louisiana plantation belle with Civil War illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. She also read the works of William Shakespeare, and the novels of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.
Mitchell’s two favorite children’s books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even into adulthood and gave them as gifts.
An imaginative writer from a precocious age, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the pages of tablet paper together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing company: “Urchin Publishing Co.” Later her stories were written in notebooks. May Belle Mitchell kept her daughter’s stories in blank enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went to college.
Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of continuing interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a “good knight” and a “bad knight” duel for the lady’s hand. In The Brave Arrow and the Maiden Stag (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must endure the pain inflicted on him to defend his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with far greater sophistication, in Mitchell’s last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which he began in 1926.
By April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, whom she is believed to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw’s classmate and friend, John R. Marsh, a copy editor from Kentucky who worked for the Associated Press. Upshaw was an Atlanta boy, a few months younger than Mitchell, whose family had moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1916. In 1919 he was appointed to the United States Naval Academy but resigned for academic deficiencies on January 5, 1920. He was readmitted in May, then 19 years old, and spent two months at sea before resigning a second time on September 1, 1920. Unsuccessful in his educational pursuits and out of work, by 1922 Upshaw was making money smuggling alcohol out of the mountains of Georgia.
Although her family disapproved, Peggy and Red married on September 2, 1922, and the best man at their wedding was John Marsh , who would become her second husband. The couple resided at Mitchell’s home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and she left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw’s alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to a divorce after John Marsh gave her a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell divorced on October 16, 1924.
On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married in the Unitarian Universalist Church. The Marshes made their home at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, taking up occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately called “The Escorial” (now the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum).
Studies
She completed her first studies in her hometown and years later enrolled in a medical school, because being a doctor was her first vocation. She was unable to realize her dream when her mother died and she had to devote herself to housework.
Having to abandon her studies, she decided to devote herself to journalism, contributing to the Atlanta Journal and Sunday Magazine, appearing under the pseudonym of Peggy Mitchell. In 1925, she married an important and prestigious personality who was involved in the world of advertising (John R. March).
Career Path
In 1926, she was the victim of an accident that confined her to a long rest and it was at that moment that she decided to begin writing the work that would make her famous throughout time: ” Gone with the Wind “, inspired by the Civil War , for which she felt a deep attraction, a product of the stories that her father had told her about history.
Divulgation
As soon as the first publication of the story narrated by Margaret appeared, its success was so shocking that it won her the Advertising Award in 1937 , and in 1942 a film based on her story was filmed, causing greater fame to her book, which set a literary record by selling 8 million copies.
Brief information about the work
” Gone with the Wind ” is a romantic and historical novel, based on the American Civil War ( Georgia ), in which the protagonist (Scarlett O’Hara) aspires to recover the plantation, the family heritage that has been destroyed, since it was the time of the abolition of slavery. The work narrates in detail the setbacks and sufferings that the protagonist was forced to face.
Death
His life was very short, so much so that he did not have time to write another work besides “Gone with the Wind”: only journalistic notes remained.
While crossing a street in Atlanta on the arm of her husband, she had an accident in which she was run over and seriously injured. She died five days later at the age of 48, on August 16 , 1949 .
Margaret Mitchell quickly rose to fame, but her characteristic modesty prevented her from changing her habits and principles. She is and will always be remembered as one of the bastions of literary art and the source of the most famous film in the history of world cinema.