The Story Behind Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell had always been physically active, but fragile. When she fell from a horse in 1920, it was the first of a series of mishaps, which ultimately forced her, in 1926, to resign from her job as a newspaper reporter at The Atlanta Journal. She began a long convalescence in the cramped, one bedroom apartment on Crescent Avenue she had nicknamed “The Dump.” Layed up and restless, Margaret devoured the books brought to her from the Atlanta library by her husband John Marsh.
“John came home one day with an arm full of books and he said ‘I have brought you all of the books that I think you can handle from the library,’ “Augusta Dearborn, a family friend, recalled. “Then he said, ‘I wish you would write one yourself.’” Marsh’s next delivery to Margaret was a Remington typewriter, accompanied by the salute: “Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.” When Margaret asked her husband what she should write about, he responded, as editors have always responded, “Write what you know.” Recalling the stories told her by her family and Confederate veterans, Margaret Mitchell set to work – in secret. Few people knew she was writing a book, and only John Marsh was allowed to read it as it progressed.
Margaret’s biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, says that writing at “The Dump” could be a claustrophobic experience: “She had no place to work. It was a small apartment, and she had no study. So, she’d work in the bedroom. She’d work in the kitchen. She’d work in the hallway. She was all over the place.” Because the Crescent Avenue apartment was the ceaselessly busy “hangout” for John and Margaret’s eclectic circle of friends, she had to take great pains to hide the manuscript – shoving manila folders full of manuscript under the bed, under the sofa, and even using pages of manuscript to wedge a wobbly table leg.
“I would go to the apartment and frequently she was at that little place that she worked,” Margaret’s friend, Harvey Smith, later recalled. “We all joked about it: ‘Well, you know she’s writing the world’s greatest novel.’…And by God, she was.” It seemed unlikely the novel would ever be published since Margaret was adamant about not revealing its existence to anyone. But another friend, Lois Cole, discovered that a novel lay in disordered chunks throughout “the Dump.” Cole, who had left Atlanta and taken a job at Macmillan Publishing in New York City, told her boss, Harold Latham, that her witty Atlanta friend might be concealing a literary treasure. “If she writes as well as she talks, it would be a honey,” Cole told Latham. On a scouting trip to Atlanta in search of new Southern authors, Latham grilled Margaret Mitchell about the book he knew she had written. She steadfastly denied any knowledge of a book.
On his last day in Atlanta, Latham again asked Margaret about the book – this time in a car full of her friends. Again, she shrugged off his inquiry. But when Latham left the car at his hotel, the girls picked up the inquisition.
“Are you writing a book, Peggy?” one demanded. “How strange you’ve never said anything about it. Why didn’t you give it to Mr. Latham?” Almost casually, Margaret replied that she thought the novel was “lousy, I was ashamed of it.” The friend said archly, “Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn’t take you for the type to write a successful book. You don’t take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.” Stung by the remark, Margaret Mitchell raced home, gathered the scattered piles of manuscript, packed them into a suitcase, and roared back to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, called Latham to the lobby and said, “Take it before I change my mind.”
What Latham read was a panoramic novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction centered on a willful young woman named Pansy O’Hara. It had no first chapter – Margaret had written the last chapter first – and Latham decided he did not like the central character’s name. Margaret agreed to change the name to Scarlett. It was the beginning of the most successful novel in history, published on June 30, 1936. It had almost as much impact on Atlanta as the events it described. “All the girls were busy reading,” recalled Pulitzer Prize-winning author George Goodwin. “You can’t imagine how that thing swept Atlanta in the summer of 1936. There were just lots of stories of people who stayed up all night to read it. I finally got a copy of it and I can understand why. Damn hard to put down.” The novel had similar success throughout the United States and around the world. It won for Margaret Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It has sold more copies worldwide than any other book except the Bible.
