Birthday: Margaret Mitchell proved that if you write the right book, you only have to do it once

Mitchell, center, with the stars and producer David Selznick

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

Author

Recipient, The National Book Award, 1936

Recipient, The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1937

Her parents had been Atlantans since the earth cooled. Her relatives were bony old Confederate veterans and plump great aunts, always reminiscing about the way of life the Yankees took away, although she claimed she was ten before she knew the South lost the war.

Margaret Mitchell’s father was a prominent attorney with sporadic progressive streaks: he thought higher education was the ruination of women but eliminated corporal punishment when he chaired the school board.

Her mother was a passionate suffragist who simultaneously terrorized her daughter and told her she must live her own life first.

Out of those beginnings came perhaps the greatest of the one-hit wonders of American literature: the author of Gone With The Wind.

Her mother won out over her father when it came to education: Peggy, as she called herself, did a year at Smith College before her mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Called home to look after her father and the family household, she got her own back by becoming a scandalous flapper, reading erotica, kissing boys while dancing, and- at one point- being engaged to five men at one time. The winner was a bootlegger called Red Upshaw. They married in September 1922 and by  December he had moved out, agreeing to an uncontested divorce after his best man, John Marsh, gave him a substantial loan.

Mitchell, married but single, needed income, and took a job with the Atlanta Journal’s Sunday magazine, where she rose above her material (interviews with the last witness to the wedding of Theodore Roosevelt’s mother; and with matinee swooner Rudolph Valentino) to become a well-regarded journalist- outside of her family.

Mitchell’s divorce became final in 1924, and in 1925 she married the best man from the first marriage, John Marsh. She carried on with the paper until breaking her ankle in 1926. It took forever to heal and she was reduced to bored, semi-invalid housewife. Marsh tired of making trips to the library for her, bought her a Remington typewriter, and challenged her to write her own book instead of reading thousands by other people.

Mitchell thought for a bit and started writing. “I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter,” she later said.

Once she started, Mitchell turned into a real-life Grady Tripp, the novelist in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, who couldn’t stop. The apartment filled with the ever-sprawling tale: masses of typescript, pages on laundry lists, anything to hand. It filled closet shelves, desk drawers and bureaus. She used one pile to steady an old couch. Since she had always had trouble with her leads in newspaper stories, she wrote the last chapter first, then composed backward to the beginning.

In three years, Mitchell was more or less done, and there the matter lay until a Macmillan talent scout, visiting Atlanta, heard of the book and met with Mitchell. She demurred, then thought better of it, and pulled out the monster. The Macmillan agent optioned the book, then went out to buy an extra suitcase to take it back to New York.

Mitchell spent six months editing and rewriting the proofs. When the 1,037-page doorstop came out in 1936, she hoped it would sell 5,000 copies.

It sold 50,000 copies almost immediately, and at the then-unheard-of price of three dollars. It kept on selling, and selling, and selling.

Hollywood paid her $50,000 for the film rights (about $850,000 today). By the time of the 1939 movie premiere in Atlanta, the frenzy was so great that Mitchell, who stood 4’11” tall, attended almost unnoticed.

By 1940 GWTW had made Mitchell a million dollars in royalties. Being its author became a full-time job. She drowned in fan mail and requests for aid. She was besieged by unexpected visitors and interview requests. People wanted sequels. They wanted to know what became of Scarlett and Rhett. All she would say was,  “For all I know, Rhett may have found someone else who was less difficult.”

By 1949 the book had been translated into thirty languages and was still selling 50,000 copies a year. One evening that year, she and her husband were crossing the street to attend a movie and were struck by a negligent driver. She lingered for a few days in hospital before dying. She was 48 years old.

Over time, her estate finally relented and several sequels have been published by other authors. Gone With The Wind sells 75,000 copies a year. Although a collection of her journalism was published after her death, there was no second novel.