The usual masculine disillusionment is in discovering that a woman has a brain.”
Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell’s birthday. Creator of Gone with the Wind, is coming up! She was born on November 8, 1900. In her honor, I’m sharing the inside story on her enduring best seller and its dicey delivery:

Margaret actually modeled Rhett Butler on her mother! Maybelle Mitchell was a feisty feminist and tough-talking suffragist who raised Margaret to think for herself. I have to believe that the immortal Scarlett got a generous dose of gumption from mom as well!

A former flapper who came of age in World War I, Margaret began writing her novel in 1926. She never intended it for publication. Penned over a decade, her story, which she saw as a kind of ongoing five-finger exercise, mushroomed into a massive pile of papers. Margaret thought of herself a poor writer and because of this, she was very private about her work. On a visit to Atlanta in 1935, Harold Latham, an editor and family friend, persuaded her to let him take a look. Margaret bundled up her pile of handwritten pages and sent them off.

Though Margaret instantly regretted her decision to show her work, Latham didn’t. The saga, which weighed in at a hefty 1,000 pages, was published in 1936 and became an instant best seller. When asked about its enormous appeal, Margaret mused, “Despite its length and many details, Gone with the Wind is basically just a simple yarn of fairly simple people. There’s no fine writing; there are no grandiose thoughts; there are no hidden meanings, no symbolism, nothing sensational — nothing, nothing at all that have made other best sellers best sellers. Then how to explain its appeal from the five-year-old to the ninety-five-year old? I can’t figure it out.”

Well, she must have been doing something right! Her novel and the movie it inspired are still being read and watched. Something to marvel at as we all write on!

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