Margaret Mitchell (edit name/settings)

ANDREA B edited the overview of Margaret Mitchell Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

• Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American author and journalist. One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind. For it she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

  Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" (or "Maybelle") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

  Margaret spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian house painted bright red with yellow trim.Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years. Captain John Stephens died in 1896, and after his death she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.<16>

  While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school .
  Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent.<60> A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".
  May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.

  Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.
  On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:
  If "out of luck" at duty's call
  In glorious action I should fall
  At God's behest,
  May those I hold most dear and best
  Know I have stood the acid test
  Should I "go West."
  Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross.
  Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion".
  Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry,but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu".Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had passed away. Knowing her death was imminent, May Belle Mitchell wrote her daughter a brief letter and advised her:
  Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
  An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue.<84> After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college.

  Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, "Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s.At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta "high society". The Apache and the Tango were scandalous dances for their elements of eroticism, the latter popularized in a 1921 silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that made its lead actor, Rudolph Valentino, a sex symbol for his ability to Tango.
  Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men, but maintained that she neither lied to or misled any of them.A local gossip columnist, who wrote under the name Polly Peachtree, described Mitchell's love life in a 1922 column:
  ...she has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly 'dead in love' with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.
  In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, whom she is thought to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw's roommate 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 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 with no job, in 1922 Upshaw earned money bootlegging alcohol out of the Georgia mountains.
  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 the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw's alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

  On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or "society" to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.
  

  In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, "Elizabeth Bennet's Gossip", which she continued to write until August. Meanwhile, Marsh was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife's mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested she write her own book instead:
  For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?
  To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett).

  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.couch. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.

  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.

  Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see a movie on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at Grady Hospital five days later without fully regaining consciousness.
  The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the accident, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death.
  Gravitt was orignally charged with drunk driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months.

ANDREA B edited the summary of Margaret Mitchell Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

• 
  
  Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle Stephens, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. She often used the nickname Peggy. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.
  
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew following her final exams in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (Mitchell later used this pivotal scene from her own life to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara Plantation.)
  
  Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal, where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.
  
  Mitchell married Red Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.
  
  

  Occupation
  

  
  From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his family.
  
  She also wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals. The first of these were so popular in Atlanta, that her editors assigned her several more. Scholars believe that it is her research for the profiles that later led her to write Gone With the Wind.
  
  Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.
  
  Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling novel in history. Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, and shows Mitchell as a young woman and a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
  
  

  Writing Gone with the Wind

  
  Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remington typewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.
  
  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.
  
  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.
  

ANDREA B edited the overview of Margaret Mitchell Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

• Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American author and journalist. One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind. For it she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

  Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" (or "Maybelle") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

  Margaret spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian house painted bright red with yellow trim.Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years. Captain John Stephens died in 1896, and after his death she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.<16>

  While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school .
  Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent.<60> A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".
  May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.

  Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.
  On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:
  If "out of luck" at duty's call
  In glorious action I should fall
  At God's behest,
  May those I hold most dear and best
  Know I have stood the acid test
  Should I "go West."
  Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross.
  Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion".
  Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry,but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu".Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had passed away. Knowing her death was imminent, May Belle Mitchell wrote her daughter a brief letter and advised her:
  Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
  An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue.<84> After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college.

  Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, "Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s.At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta "high society". The Apache and the Tango were scandalous dances for their elements of eroticism, the latter popularized in a 1921 silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that made its lead actor, Rudolph Valentino, a sex symbol for his ability to Tango.
  Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men, but maintained that she neither lied to or misled any of them.A local gossip columnist, who wrote under the name Polly Peachtree, described Mitchell's love life in a 1922 column:
  ...she has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly 'dead in love' with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.
  In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, whom she is thought to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw's roommate 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 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 with no job, in 1922 Upshaw earned money bootlegging alcohol out of the Georgia mountains.
  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 the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw's alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

  On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or "society" to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.
  In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, "Elizabeth Bennet's Gossip", which she continued to write until August.<116>August. Meanwhile, Marsh was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife's mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested she write her own book instead:
  For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?<132>them?
  To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

  Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see a movie on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at Grady Hospital five days later without fully regaining consciousness.
  The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the accident, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death.
  Gravitt was orignally charged with drunk driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months.

ANDREA B edited the overview of Margaret Mitchell Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

• Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American author and journalist. One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind. For it she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

  Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" (or "Maybelle") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

  Margaret spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian house painted bright red with yellow trim.Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years. Captain John Stephens died in 1896, and after his death she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.<16>

  While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school .
  Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent.<60> A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".
  May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.

  Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry,<73>Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17.<74>17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.<75>ring.
  On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17.<74><76>17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:
  If "out of luck" at duty's call
  In glorious action I should fall
  At God's behest,
  May those I hold most dear and best
  Know I have stood the acid test
  Should I "go West."<77>West."
  Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane.<78>plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross.
  Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion".
  Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry,but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu".Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had passed away. Knowing her death was imminent, May Belle Mitchell wrote her daughter a brief letter and advised her:
  Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
  An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue.<84> After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college.

  Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, "Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s.At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta "high society". The Apache and the Tango were scandalous dances for their elements of eroticism, the latter popularized in a 1921 silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that made its lead actor, Rudolph Valentino, a sex symbol for his ability to Tango.
  Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men, but maintained that she neither lied to or misled any of them.A local gossip columnist, who wrote under the name Polly Peachtree, described Mitchell's love life in a 1922 column:
  ...she has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly 'dead in love' with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.
  In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, whom she is thought to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw's roommate 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 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 with no job, in 1922 Upshaw earned money bootlegging alcohol out of the Georgia mountains.
  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 the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw's alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

  On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or "society" to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.
  In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, "Elizabeth Bennet's Gossip", which she continued to write until August.<116> Meanwhile, Marsh was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife's mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested she write her own book instead:
  For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?<132>
  To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

  Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see a movie on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at Grady Hospital five days later without fully regaining consciousness.
  The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the accident, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death.
  Gravitt was orignally charged with drunk driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months.

ANDREA B edited the overview of Margaret Mitchell Wednesday, February 20, 2013.

• Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American author and journalist. One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind. For it she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.

  Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" (or "Maybelle") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

  Margaret spent her early childhood on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Her family lived near her grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian house painted bright red with yellow trim.Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several years. Captain John Stephens died in 1896, and after his death she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.<16>

  While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school .
  Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent.<60> A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".
  May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.

  Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry,<73> who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17.<74> Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.<75>
  On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17.<74><76> As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:
  If "out of luck" at duty's call
  In glorious action I should fall
  At God's behest,
  May those I hold most dear and best
  Know I have stood the acid test
  Should I "go West."<77>
  Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane.<78> He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross.
  Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion".
  Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry,but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu".Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had passed away. Knowing her death was imminent, May Belle Mitchell wrote her daughter a brief letter and advised her:
  Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
  An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue.<84> After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college.

  Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, "Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s.At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta "high society". The Apache and the Tango were scandalous dances for their elements of eroticism, the latter popularized in a 1921 silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that made its lead actor, Rudolph Valentino, a sex symbol for his ability to Tango.
  Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men, but maintained that she neither lied to or misled any of them.A local gossip columnist, who wrote under the name Polly Peachtree, described Mitchell's love life in a 1922 column:
  ...she has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly 'dead in love' with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.
  In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily; one was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, whom she is thought to have met in 1917 at a dance hosted by the parents of one of her friends, and the other, Upshaw's roommate 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 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 with no job, in 1922 Upshaw earned money bootlegging alcohol out of the Georgia mountains.
  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 the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw's alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

  On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or "society" to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.
  In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, "Elizabeth Bennet's Gossip", which she continued to write until August.<116> Meanwhile, Marsh was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife's mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested she write her own book instead:
  For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?<132>
  To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O'Hara (prior to publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

  Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see a movie on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at Grady Hospital five days later without fully regaining consciousness.
  The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the accident, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell's death.
  Gravitt was orignally charged with drunk driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months.

Charisma edited the summary of Margaret Mitchell Tuesday, October 12, 2010.

• 
  
  Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle Stephens, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. She often used the nickname Peggy. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.
  
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew following her final exams in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (Mitchell later used this pivotal scene from her own life to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara Plantation.)
  
  Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal, where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.
  
  Mitchell married Red Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.
  
  

  Occupation
  

  
  From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his family.
  
  She also wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals. The first of these were so popular in Atlanta, that her editors assigned her several more. Scholars believe that it is her research for the profiles that later led her to write Gone With the Wind.
  
  Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.
  
  Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling novel in history.<3>history. Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, and shows Mitchell as a young woman and a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
  
  

  Writing Gone with the Wind

   

  
  Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remington typewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.
  
  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.
  
  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.
  

Charisma edited the summary of Margaret Mitchell Tuesday, October 12, 2010.

• 
  
  Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle Stephens, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. She often used the nickname Peggy. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.
  
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew following her final exams in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (Mitchell later used this pivotal scene from her own life to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara Plantation.)
  
  Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal, where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.
  
  Mitchell married Red Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.
  
  

  OccupationOccupation
  

  
  From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his family.
  
  She also wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals. The first of these were so popular in Atlanta, that her editors assigned her several more. Scholars believe that it is her research for the profiles that later led her to write Gone With the Wind.
  
  Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.
  
  Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling novel in history.<3> Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, and shows Mitchell as a young woman and a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
  
  

  Writing Gone with the Wind

   

  
  Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remington typewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.
  
  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.
  
  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.
  

Charisma edited the summary of Margaret Mitchell Tuesday, October 12, 2010.

• 
  
  Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle Stephens, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. She often used the nickname Peggy. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil War.
  
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew following her final exams in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (Mitchell later used this pivotal scene from her own life to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara Plantation.)
  
  Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal, where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.
  
  Mitchell married Red Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.
  
  

  Occupation
  

  
  From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his family.
  
  She also wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals. The first of these were so popular in Atlanta, that her editors assigned her several more. Scholars believe that it is her research for the profiles that later led her to write Gone With the Wind.
  
  Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.
  
  Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling novel in history.<3> Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, and shows Mitchell as a young woman and a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
  
  

  Writing Gone with the Wind

  
  Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remington typewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.
  
  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.
  
  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.
  

Charisma edited the summary of Margaret Mitchell Tuesday, October 12, 2010.

•   
  
  Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Mitchell, a lawyer, and Mary Isabelle Stephens, a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin. Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was four years her senior. She often used the nickname "Peggy.Peggy. Her childhood was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives, who had lived through the Civil WarWar.
  
  After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), she attended Smith College, but withdrew following her final exams in 1918. She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 19181918. (Mitchell later used this pivotal scene from her own life to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara Plantation).Plantation.)
  
  Shortly afterward, she defied the conventions of her class and times by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal, where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper. Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite, whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.
  
  Mitchell married Red Upshaw in 1922, but they were divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. She later married Upshaw's friend, John Marsh, on July 4, 1925; Marsh had been best man at her first wedding and legend has it that both men courted Mitchell in 1921 and 1922, but Upshaw proposed first.
  
  

  Occupation
  

  From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, including interviews with silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, high-society murderer Harry K. Thaw, and a Georgia prisoner who made artificial flowers from scraps and sold them from his cell to support his familyfamily.
  
  She also wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals. The first of these were so popular in Atlanta, that her editors assigned her several more. Scholars believe that it is her research for the profiles that later led her to write Gone With the Wind.
  
  Using Mitchell's scrapbooks from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, editor Patrick Allen collected 64 of the columns Mitchell considered her best work. They were published in 2000 under the title Margaret Mitchell, Reporter.
  
  Her portraits and personality sketches in particular show a promise of her skill to portray the kind of characters who made Gone With the Wind the second best-selling novel in history.<3> Even as a supposedly neutral reporter, her irrepressible personality shines through. This collection of Mitchell's journalism transcends fact-gathering, and shows Mitchell as a young woman and a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.
  
  

  Writing Gone with the Wind
  

  Mitchell is reported to have begun writing Gone With the Wind while bedridden with a broken ankle. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home historical books from the public library to amuse her while she recuperated. After she supposedly read all the historical books in the library, he told her, "Peggy, if you want another book, why don't you write your own?" She drew upon her encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and dramatic moments from her own life, and typed her epic novel on an old Remington typewriter. She originally called the heroine "Pansy O'Hara", and Tara was "Fontenoy Hall". She considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day.
  
  Mitchell wrote for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, kept her novel secret from her friends. She hid the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, hid them in her closets, and under her bed. She wrote the last chapter first, and skipped around from chapter to chapter. Her husband regularly proofread the growing manuscript to help in continuity. By 1929, her ankle had healed, most of the book was written, and she lost interest in pursuing her literary efforts.
  
  While Mitchell used to say that her Gone With the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in her life, and people she knew or heard of. For example, the character Rhett Butler may have been modeled after her first husband. The last thing he said to her (supposedly) was, "My dear, I don't give a damn", which is what Rhett says to Scarlett before he leaves her in the book, Frankly was added for the movie.
  
  

stephanie edited the bio of Margaret Mitchell Friday, September 10, 2010.

• Genres: Historical FictionFiction, Novella