Margaret Mitchell Novelist - Born 8 November 1900 · Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Died 16 August 1949 · Atlanta, Georgia, USA (road accident)

Birth name Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell

Nickname Peggy

Height 4′ 11″ (1.50 m)

Mini Bio Margaret Mitchell was an American historical novelist and a journalist. She published only one completed novel in her lifetime, "Gone with the Wind" (1936), which covered a woman's struggle for survival through the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and it was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. Mitchell had completed the romance novella "Lost Laysen" in her adolescence, but it was only published posthumously in 1996. A collection of Mitchell's newspaper articles was published under the title ""Margaret Mitchell: Reporter" (2000). Several of her writings from her early life have been published under the title "Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell." (2000).

In 1900, Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was Eugene Mitchell (1866-1944), a prominent lawyer, politician, and historian. He served a term as the President of the Atlanta Board of Education (1911-1912), and co-founded the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell's mother was Maybelle Stephens Mitchell (1872-1919), a prominent suffragist leader, and a co-founder of both the League of Women Voters in Georgia and the Catholic Layman's Association of Georgia. Mitchell's paternal ancestors were Scottish-Americans, and her maternal ancestors were Irish-Americans.

During her early childhood, Mitchell lived with her family at a Jackson Street mansion, east of downtown Atlanta. The mansion was owned by Miitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Stephens (d. 1934) , who lived with them. Stephens was reportedly a tyrant to her family, and had a somewhat adversarial relationship with her granddaughter. But Mitchell went on to interview her for "eye-witness information" about the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. Stephen's memories were one of the primary sources for "Gone with the Wind" .

Mitchell's mother had the habit of dressing her daughter in boys' pants, because she thought that they were safer than dresses. Mitchell continued dressing as a boy until she was 14, and her family nicknamed her "Jimmy" (after the comic strip character "Little Jimmy"). Mitchell was a tomboy in her childhood, and her favorite pastime was to ride her Texas plains pony. Aging Confederate soldiers tried to entertain the young girl by narrating to her gritty details of specific battles from the Civil War.

In 1912, the Mitchell family moved to a new residence at the east side of Peachtree Street. The house was located at a short distance from the Chattahoochee River. The family reportedly had concerns about the safety of their Jackson Hill home, due to its proximity to areas affected by the Atlanta Race Riot (1906). The Jackson Hill home was eventually destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917.

By the early 1910s , Mitchell was an avid reader. Among her favorite writers were Edith Nesbit and Thomas Dixon. Mitchell started writing fairy tales and adventure stories as a hobby. Among her early works was "The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden" (1913), about a mixed-race "Indian" who has to endure pain to win over his love interest. Mitchell's mother kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes.

In 1914, Mitchell started attending Atlanta's Washington Seminary, a then-fashionable private girls' school. The school had over 300 students. Mitchell joined the school's drama club. She was still a tomboy, and she habitually played the male characters in performances of William Shakespeare's plays. She also joined the school's literary club, and had her stories published in the school's yearbook. Among her first published stories was the revenge-themed "Little Sister", where a little girl shoots her sister's rapist.

In 1918, Mitchell graduated and started preparing for a college education, at the insistence of her mother. Her mother chose which school Mitchell would attend, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. At the time, it was reputedly "the best women's college in the United States". Before her college classes started, Mitchell was engaged to her first serious love interest, the army lieutenant Clifford West Henry. He was send to fight in France in July 1918, and was mortally wounded in October of the same year. Mitchell would continue mourning him for years.

In 1919, Mitchell's mother died from the flu. She was one of the many victims of a flu pandemic that had started in 1918. Mitchell arrived home from college, a day after her mother had died. She found that her mother left a short letter of advise for her, telling her to take care of herself before taking care of other causes.

Later in 1919, Mitchell dropped out of college. She did not excel in any area of academics, and her father expected her to take over the family's household. Mitchell had health problems of her own, and had an appendectomy in the autumn of 1919. Mitchell was feeling increasingly disappointed with her life's direction, as she wrote to a friend. In 1920, Mitchell made her Atlanta society debut. Shortly after, she started dressing as a flapper. In 1921, she shocked the Atlanta high society by performing an Apache dance in a charity ball, and kissing her male partner during the performance. She was consequently blacklisted from the Junior League.

In 1922, Mitchell started dating the bootlegger Berrien ("Red") Kinnard Upshaw (1901-1949). In September 1922. the couple were married against her family's wishes. They both moved in with Mitchell's father. Red was an alcoholic with a violent temper, and Mitchell suffered physical abuse at his hands. They agreed to a period of separation in December 1922, and their divorce was finalized in October 1924. In 1925, Mitchell married her second husband John Robert Marsh (1895-1952). He was Red's former roommate, and another love interest for Mitchell since 1922. Marsh had reportedly secured Mitchell's uncontested divorce, by giving Red a loan. Mitchell and her new husband set their residence at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, nicknaming their new home "The Dump". It would later become known as Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.

Between her two marriages, Mitchell had decided that she needed her own source of income. In 1922, she started working as a journalist for "The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine". Among her early successes was securing a 1923 interview with the then-popular actor Rudolph Valentino. She continued her journalistic career until May 1926. At the time of her resignation, Mitchell had suffered an ankle injury that would not heal properly. Her mobility problems prevented her from working on assignments.In her four years as a journalist, Mitchell wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.

Following her resignation from "The Atlanta Journal", Mitchell worked for a few months as a gossip columnist for the "Sunday Magazine". In 1926, Marsh asked his increasingly bored wife why she did not write a book of her own instead of reading thousands of them. By 1928, Mitchell started work on a historical novel of her own. In 1935, her novel was still unfinished. But the book editor Harold Latham of Macmillan read her manuscript and was convinced that it was a potential best-seller. Having secured a publisher, Mitchell spend 6 months in making revisions and checking the novel's historical references. "Gone with the Wind" was published in June 1936.

Her novel turned Mitchell into a literary celebrity, but she had no intention of writing further works. In September 1941, Mitchell christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-51). During World War II, Mitchell served as a volunteer for the American Red Cross. She raised money for the war effort by selling war bonds. In 1944, she christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-104).

On August 11, 1949, Mitchell crossed Peachtree Street with her husband. They were on their way to a movie theatre, when Mitchell was struck by a drunk driver. She was hospitalized at Grady Hospital. She died on August 16, without ever regaining consciousness. She was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. Her husband was buried by her side in 1952. Though Mitchell is long gone, her novel never went out of print. It remains popular into the 21st century. Mitchell was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Dimos I

Family Spouses

John R. Marsh (July 4, 1925 - August 16, 1949) (her death)

Berrien Kinnard "Red" Upshaw (September 2, 1922 - October 16, 1924) (divorced)

Parents

Eugene Muse Mitchell

Mary Isabel "Maybelle" (Stephens) Mitchell

Trivia

In 1936, the movie producer David O. Selznick bought the film rights to Margaret Mitchell's novel for $50,000. However, after Gone with the Wind (1939) had become a very best-selling film, Mr. Selznick decided that he had drastically underpaid Ms. Mitchell, and he sent her an additional $50,000.

On August 11, 1949, Ms. Mitchell was crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta to enter a movie theater with her husband John Marsh. She was hit by a speeding automobile that was driven by an off-duty taxi driver (driving his own car, not a taxicab) and was badly injured. She was taken to the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, but she passed away five days later without ever regaining consciousness.

Margaret Mitchell claimed that she had never intended to publish "Gone With the Wind". In 1935, a friend of hers told Harold Latham, a visiting editor from the MacMillan publishing company, about the book. After some persuasion, Ms. Mitchell took the manuscript to his hotel. Mr. Latham stated that the stack of papers was almost as tall as Margaret was. Most of the pages had become mildewed and the book's chapters were out of order. After Margaret gave her manuscript to Mr. Latham she changed her mind about its possible publication and requested that he send the manuscript back to her. Mr. Lathams declined to do so. After reading the manuscript he realized that he had a very good book and published "Gone with the Wind" in 1936. It literally became an overnight success selling over a million copies in six months time and one million seven hundred thousand copies within a year of publication. It was in those days and is said to be still the second most printed book in the world, second only to the bible.

Ms. Mitchell began writing "Gone With the Wind" in 1926, after breaking her ankle in the same spot that she had broken it in a fall from a horse when she was a girl.

Ms. Mitchell learned most of the Southern and War Between the States' history that she knew from her paternal grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, who had been a Confederate soldier. Margaret once joked that she had heard so much Civil War history from her grandfather that she was ten years old before she realized that the South had not won the War. Mitchell also learned some Southern history from her father, Eugene Mitchell, who was a real estate attorney in Atlanta and also an amateur historian. Mr. Mitchell was also a founder of the Atlanta Historical Society.

Ms. Mitchell steadfastly refused to help in the production of the movie of "Gone with the Wind". She told the producer David O. Selznick that he had bought the novel. It was there to do with as he pleased in filming it. Mitchell did send her friend, Susan Myrick, to Mr. Selznick as a technical advisor for the film. After that, Mr. Selznick left Mitchell alone.

In another effort to discourage questions about David O. Selznick's film adaptation of her novel, "Gone With the Wind", she told newspaper reporters - with all the seriousness she could muster - that she thought Groucho Marx would have make a good Rhett Butler.

Margaret Mitchell stated that she would never write a sequel to "Gone With the Wind". After her death, her husband John Marsh became the executor of her estate, and when Mr. Marsh passed away in 1952, Margaret's brother Stephens Mitchell became the executor. During his lifetime, Stephens firmly refused to grant publication rights to any sequel (in print or on film), and he also rejected the idea of any film remake of "GWTW". Only after the death of Stephens was a sequel novel authorized by Ms. Mitchell's estate. The title of the sequel is "Scarlett", and it was later presented as a made-for-TV movie.

Miss Mitchell attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachussetts, for one academic year, 1918 - 19. She dropped out of college when her mother became ill with the flu during the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Maybelle Mitchell, Margaret's mother, died of the flu in January 1919. At that time Margaret returned home to Atlanta to take care of her father's home. She never returned to college at Smith or anywhere else. Smith College did award Ms. Mitchell, however, an honorary college degree after her novel, "Gone with the Wind", won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Literature in 1937.

Ms. Mitchell approved of the interpretation of Scarlett O'Hara by the British actress Vivien Leigh, after Mitchell finally viewed the film version of Gone with the Wind (1939). Overall, Mitchell also liked this film interpretation of her novel, with just a few minor quibbles. She thought that the mansion house called "Tara" (at the O'Hara family's plantation) should have been quite less opulent. Mitchell also reportedly did not like what the introductory "crawl" said, the one which appears on the screen after the opening titles. It says "There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South ... ", which Ms. Mitchell thought was too lush in its wording.

Her own favorite choice for the part of Rhett Butler was Basil Rathbone.

Mitchell's writing career began as a journalist for the "Atlanta Journal" newspaper in 1922. She continued at the Atlanta Journal until a broken ankle forced her to resign in 1926.

Mitchell was pictured on a one-cent American postage stamp in the "Great Americans" series, and hers was issued for sale at post offices on June 30, 1986.

Ms. Mitchell was a good friend of the novelist Edwin Granberry. He was so impressed with her novel, "Gone With the Wind", that he rated it up with Lev Tolstoy's novel, "War and Peace". This sparked a lifetime friendship between the two, and he convinced Mitchell to agree to accept a payment of $50,000 for the movie rights for her novel in the contract negotiations with the purchaser David O. Selznick.

Ms. Mitchell's remains were buried beside those of her husband, John Marsh, in the historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia.

Her parents were both attorneys.

A classmate at Smith College was Otelia Cromwell, the first Black student admitted to Smith. She was the first Black to graduate Smith, earned a doctorate from Yale and became a distinguished scholar.

Had a brother Stevens Mitchell.

Her second husband John Marsh was best man at her first marriage to Berrien Upshaw.

Quotes

[on 'Gone with the Wind] I hope I never write another thing as long as I live.

[on being asked what eventually became of the famous lovers in 'Gone with the Wind'] For all I know, Rhett may have found someone else who was less difficult.

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

Marriage 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 and led to her being blacklisted from the Junior League. 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 nor 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") Kinnard Upshaw (March 10, 1901 – January 13, 1949), 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 Robert Marsh (October 6, 1895 – March 5, 1952), 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; 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.

During this time, Mitchell left the Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian.

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 occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately named "The Dump" (now the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum).