Margaret Mitchell Research Paper

Margaret Mitchell died on August 16, 1949 after being in Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta for five days, “where she was taken after being hit by speeding taxi run by a drunken driver. She was crossing the road with her husband going to watch Canterbury Tales” (“Margaret”). She was buried in the Oakland cemetery in Atlanta. Who was Margaret Mitchell? Many know her simply as the writer of Gone With The Wind, yet she had a full life of education, love, abuse, and actually created more characters than just Scarlett and friends. As a matter of fact, she was not a big fan of that particular book. (“Margaret,” “On,”and “Thomas” )

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 8, 1900. Her mother was a suffragist and her father was lawyer

When she was younger, she wrote a story called The Big Four about some girls in a boarding school. She wrote a story called Little Sister as well as a novel called Lost Laysen, which was written in two notebooks that were given to her boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. This novel was found long after she died and published posthumously (“Margaret”). Then there was her masterpiece. Mitchell sat at home with a broken ankle and nothing to do. To cure her boredom, she began to write Gone With The Wind, with the “last chapter first and the other chapters in no particular order”(“Thomas”).

Eventually, this novel would bring her fame and $1,000,000 in four years, but it really disrupted her life. Autographs and interviews, which she accepted at first, began to consume her, until she declined such requests and tried to be content with being a simple housewife. Leaving for the mountains to hideaway “from the throngs which besieged her by telephone, telegraph and in person” she said in exasperation that she would never “write another word as long as she lived. The novel...might almost be labeled a Frankenstein which overwhelmed its maker”(“On” and

Medora Perkerson, Mitchell discusses her novel and her life. She says that it, “isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time”(“American Rebel”). “Gone With the Wind” begins on a plantation “in the period when the old style Southern life was at its height”(“American Rebel”). Then the war arrives, and the main character, Scarlett O’Hara moves to Atlanta, which was a small obscure town until it became important in the war. Scarlett experiences “the thrills and excitement of the boom town that Atlanta became when the war changed it” the difficulties as the Confederacy began to fail, then the “alarm of Atlanta people as they saw General Sherman’s army advancing steadily on the town, and finally the terrifying days of the siege, the capture of Atlanta by Sherman and the burning of the town”(“American Rebel”). After the war is over, Scarlett comes back to Atlanta and helps rebuild the city. “She lives through the terrible days of Reconstruction...up to the time when the Carpetbaggers had been run out of Georgia and people could bean living their normal lives again”(“American