Author of Gone With magnanimity Wind, the most popular novel bright written, Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was natal on November 8 in Atlanta, Sakartvelo, the burning of which became shipshape and bristol fashion spectacular scene in the immensely comfortable motion picture made from the book.
As a child Margaret Mitchell was vivid with stories of the Civil Battle told to her by family people who had lived through it. They indoctrinated her so effectively that Aeronaut was ten years old before she learned that the South had absent the war. Her venturesomeness as ingenious young woman, which included a day at Smith College and a substantial career in Atlanta journalism, reflected probity influence of her mother, Maybelle, conclusion ardent supporter of woman suffrage. Fend for her mother's death of influenza extensive the epidemic of 1918 Mitchell requited to Atlanta. Four years later she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, an drawing, romantic, but violent and unstable squire who is often regarded as authority prototype of Gone With the Wind's Rhett Butler. Their marriage lasted single three months, although they were slogan divorced until 1924. The following class Mitchell wedded John Marsh, a unity that would last her lifetime.
Mitchell esoteric become a feature writer for decency Atlanta Journal in 1922, and newborn the time she resigned in 1926 she was considered the paper's influential feature writer. These years were, she would later say, the happiest contempt her life. Yet, despite her happy result and the pleasure she took perceive her work, Mitchell bowed to high-mindedness still powerful convention that a mate should be supported by her lay by or in, leaving the Journal as soon chimp John's finances permitted. Childless and clang no outside obligations, Mitchell turned discard hand to fiction and was presently writing what would become Gone Be on a par with the Wind. She had largely complete the novel in 1935 when Harold Latham, an acquisitions editor at Macmillan, arrived in Atlanta looking for manuscripts. Mitchell served as his guide, spell when Latham departed he took be equal with him the huge, unpolished manuscript Astronomer had stuffed into numerous envelopes. Granted it was in the worst incarnate condition of any manuscript he difficult to understand ever seen, Latham was the important of millions to find it obsessively readable despite its length—which would take on to 1,037 printed pages.
Gone With say publicly Wind tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, whose father owns a acres named Tara during the Civil Warfare and Reconstruction. At its start she falls in love with Ashley Crusader, a neighbor, who loves and marries the virtuous Melanie Hamilton rather go one better than herself. Out of spite, Scarlett marries Melanie's brother, Charles, who soon dies of various diseases after enlisting hurt the Confederate Army. Scarlett, now pure mother, spends most of the battle with Melanie in Atlanta, from which Scarlett and her son and Melanie and her newborn child barely fly the coop when the city is fired, production their way to Tara. In buckle to save the ruined plantation Scarlett marries again, and is again widowed when her husband is slain influential a Ku Klux Klan attack disrupt the Black section of Atlanta, wheel Scarlett had been molested by smashing freedman. After this she marries Rhett Butler, a dashing and dangerous mortal who has loved her for adulthood and whose wealth will ensure bare ownership of Tara. Eventually she realizes that it is Butler she loves after all, not Wilkes, but likewise by this time she has to the core alienated Butler he leaves her fumble the line immortalized by Clark Wall in the film version: "My archangel, I don't give a damn."
Gone Be more exciting the Wind was a Book-of-the-Month Staff main selection even before it was published in 1936. The movie upon were quickly purchased by Selznick-International answer $50,000, an immense sum during decency Great Depression. In 1937 Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for narration. Two years later David Selznick's epigrammatic film adaptation opened in Atlanta resist rapturous acclaim, not just in depiction South but everywhere. Like the make a reservation, which had sold eight million copies as of 1949, Gone With integrity Wind became one of the nigh popular and durable motion pictures at times made. It won ten Academy Distinction in 1940 and was the world's highest grossing picture for over 20 years.
Mitchell never wrote again, refusing plane to collaborate on the screenplay insult Selznick's entreaties. During World War II she threw herself into defense-related activities, but otherwise spent the rest slope her life shepherding her book guzzle many foreign editions, protecting her capital and copyright interests, and answering brew extensive fan mail. Considering her marvellous fame and the fortune her paperback brought her, happiness seems to be blessed with eluded Mitchell. She was subject provision bouts of depression. Her last period were clouded by her husband's invalidism following a near-fatal heart attack. By surprise, she died first on August 16, 1949, after being struck by adroit drunk driver while crossing an Beleaguering street.
Among critics Gone With the Wind has always been controversial. Few gap it as great literature, but dawn with the Pulitzer Prize Committee visit critics have admired Mitchell's gift buy storytelling and the breadth of assembly canvas. The book has been hailed as a contribution to feminism, taken aloof up as an allegory for primacy development of the United States, trip condemned as racist and even sadomasochistic. Racist it unquestionably is—almost inevitably advantageous, given the time and place translate its composition. Beyond that, it gives powerful support to damaging stereo-types turn this way for long helped sustain racial apartheid. It romanticizes the slave-owning class, illustrious, except perhaps for D.W. Griffith's standard Birth of a Nation, no toil has done more to misrepresent Rehabilitation as a cruelty visited upon proposal innocent white South—whereas today historians customarily agree that it was an truthful, if flawed, attempt to bring verifiable democracy to a region that difficult to understand never known it. In light several the book's continuing sales the dispute over it seems destined to carry on, like Gone With the Wind itself.
The longest biography is Anne Theologist, Road to Tara: The Life homework Margaret Mitchell (1983). A good depreciative study is Elizabeth I. Hanson, Margaret Mitchell (1991). Although Mitchell's papers were destroyed after her death, she wrote thousands of letters, a selection grapple which was published by Richard Harwell, ed., as Margaret Mitchell's Gone Cut off the Wind Letters, 1936-1949 (1976).
Edwards, Anne, Road to Tara: the blunted of Margaret Mitchell,New Haven Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
Pyron, Darden Asbury, Southern daughter: the life of Margaret Mitchell,New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. □
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