Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell

MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL

32 group

Blus Alexander

Kiev 2003

MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL was born in November 8, 1900, Atlanta .She

died in Aug. 16, 1949. Atlanta in full MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL American

author of the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind.Mitchell attended

Washington Seminary in her native Atlanta, Georgia, before enrolling at

Smith College in 1918. When her mother died the next year, she returned

home. Between 1922 and 1926 she was a writer and reporter for the Atlanta

Journal. After an ankle injury in 1926 she left the paper and, for the next

10 years, worked slowly on a romantic novel about the Civil War and

Reconstruction as seen from a Southern point of view. The novel featured

Scarlett O'Hara, a strong-willed coquette and jezebel. From her family

Mitchell had absorbed the history of the South, the tragedy of the war, and

the romance of the Lost Cause. She worked at her novel sporadically,

composing episodes out of sequence and later fitting them together. She

apparently had little thought of publication at first, and for six years

after it was substantially finished the novel lay unread. But in 1935

Mitchell was persuaded to submit her manuscript for publication.It appeared

in 1936 as Gone with the Wind (quoting a line from the poem "Cynara" by

Ernest Dowson). Within six months 1,000,000 copies had been sold; 50,000

copies were sold in one day. It went on to sell more copies than any other

novel in U.S. publishing history, with sales passing 12 million by 1965,

and was eventually translated into 25 languages and sold in 40 countries.

It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The motion-picture rights were

sold for $50,000. The film, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and

produced by David O. Selznick, premiered in Atlanta in December 1939 after

an unprecedented period of advance promotion, including the highly

publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett. It won nine major Oscars

and two special Oscars at the Academy Awards and for two decades reigned as

the top moneymaking film of all time. Mitchell, who never adjusted to the

celebrity that had befallen her and who never attempted another book, died

after an automobile accident in 1949. Four decades after Mitchell's death,

her estate permitted the writing of a sequel by Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett:

The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" (1991), which was

generally unfavourably appraised by critics.