Duke of Buckingham
11-07-13, 08:10 PM
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Margaret_Mitchell_NYWTS.jpg/473px-Margaret_Mitchell_NYWTS.jpg
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 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 prior to Margaret's birth; Captain John Stephens died in 1896. After his death, she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.
Grandmother Annie Stephens was quite a character, both vulgar and a tyrant. After gaining control of her father Philip Fitzgerald's money after he died, she splurged on her younger daughters, including Margaret's mother, and sent them to finishing school in the north. There they learned that Irish Americans were not treated as equal to other immigrants, and that it was shameful to be a daughter of an Irishman. Margaret's relationship with her grandmother would become quarrelsome in later years as she entered adulthood. However, for Margaret, her grandmother was a great source of "eye-witness information" about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta prior to her death in 1934.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Peach_Tree_Street_Atlanta_1907.jpg
Stereoscope card showing the business district on Peachtree Street ca. 1907. The Mitchells' new home was about 3 miles from here.
While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers. An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels", the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's "March and torch" through Georgia. Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:
She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.
From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.
Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:
On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.
On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro. Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.
An imaginative writer from a precocious age, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. May Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college.
"Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked.
Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926.
In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book".
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Margaret_Mitchell_1941_on_USS_Atlanta_%28CL-51%29.jpg
Margaret Mitchell (1941) in her Red Cross uniform aboard the USS Atlanta (CL-51).
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, her husband 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 that 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). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.
“I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter. ”
—Margaret Mitchell
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/MargaretMitchell-grave.jpg/706px-MargaretMitchell-grave.jpg
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 originally charged with drunken 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.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide would incorrectly think it was the true story of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film version of the novel "amplified this effect". Scholars of the period have written in recent years about the negative effects the novel has had on race relations by its resurrection of Lost Cause mythology.
http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Leigh,%20Vivien/Annex/Annex%20-%20Leigh,%20Vivien%20(Gone%20With%20the%20Wind)_07 .jpg
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 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 prior to Margaret's birth; Captain John Stephens died in 1896. After his death, she inherited property on Jackson Street where Margaret's family lived.
Grandmother Annie Stephens was quite a character, both vulgar and a tyrant. After gaining control of her father Philip Fitzgerald's money after he died, she splurged on her younger daughters, including Margaret's mother, and sent them to finishing school in the north. There they learned that Irish Americans were not treated as equal to other immigrants, and that it was shameful to be a daughter of an Irishman. Margaret's relationship with her grandmother would become quarrelsome in later years as she entered adulthood. However, for Margaret, her grandmother was a great source of "eye-witness information" about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta prior to her death in 1934.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Peach_Tree_Street_Atlanta_1907.jpg
Stereoscope card showing the business district on Peachtree Street ca. 1907. The Mitchells' new home was about 3 miles from here.
While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers. An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels", the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's "March and torch" through Georgia. Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:
She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.
From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.
Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:
On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.
On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro. Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.
An imaginative writer from a precocious age, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. May Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college.
"Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked.
Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926.
In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book".
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Margaret_Mitchell_1941_on_USS_Atlanta_%28CL-51%29.jpg
Margaret Mitchell (1941) in her Red Cross uniform aboard the USS Atlanta (CL-51).
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, her husband 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 that 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). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.
“I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter. ”
—Margaret Mitchell
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/MargaretMitchell-grave.jpg/706px-MargaretMitchell-grave.jpg
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 originally charged with drunken 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.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide would incorrectly think it was the true story of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film version of the novel "amplified this effect". Scholars of the period have written in recent years about the negative effects the novel has had on race relations by its resurrection of Lost Cause mythology.
http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Leigh,%20Vivien/Annex/Annex%20-%20Leigh,%20Vivien%20(Gone%20With%20the%20Wind)_07 .jpg