Margaret Mitchell

 

A husband’s teasing remark and a broken ankle — that’s all it took to ignite one of the greatest novels ever written. In 1926, Margaret Mitchell found herself trapped at home in Atlanta with a stubbornly broken ankle that refused to heal. The once-spirited journalist, who had covered city scandals and written sharp editorials, was now confined to a sofa, her restless mind caged in silence. To ease her boredom, her husband, John Marsh, brought her stacks of books from the library. She devoured them all — biographies, romances, histories — and dismissed most with cutting wit.

Finally, one evening, tired of her endless critiques, John set a typewriter in front of her. “Peggy,” he said with a teasing smile, “if you can’t find a book worth reading, why don’t you write one yourself?”

It was meant as a joke. But for Margaret, something stirred.

What began as a distraction soon became an obsession. She started writing about the world she knew — the old South she’d grown up hearing about, filled with war, pride, and the unyielding will to survive. At its heart was a woman both flawed and indestructible, one who refused to surrender no matter how much life took from her: Scarlett O’Hara.

Margaret wrote furiously, often into the night, surrounded by piles of paper. Yet she told almost no one. She hid her manuscript from visitors, mortified at the thought that someone might see her “scribbling.” Even after her ankle healed, she kept writing — secretly, quietly, for nearly a decade.

Her secret might have remained forever tucked away if not for another offhand comment. In 1935, an editor from Macmillan visited Atlanta and casually remarked that Mitchell didn’t seem like someone who could finish a novel. The words struck her pride like a match. The very next day, Margaret handed over her massive, unedited manuscript — thousands of pages thick, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string.

When Gone with the Wind was published in 1936, the world exploded with it. Within six months, it sold more than a million copies. Newspapers called it “a national sensation.” Critics hailed it as an instant classic. In 1937, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Two years later, Hollywood transformed her epic into one of cinema’s grandest triumphs. The 1939 film Gone with the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, became a cultural phenomenon — winning 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Its sweeping romance, unforgettable score, and the iconic line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” etched themselves into history. To this day, it remains one of the most successful and beloved films ever made, adjusted for inflation the highest-grossing movie of all time.

But fame was never what Margaret wanted. “I will never write another book,” she once said quietly to a friend, and she meant it. The spotlight made her uneasy. She withdrew from public life, declining interviews and avoiding parties. For a woman who’d written one of the most sweeping stories of all time, she lived the rest of her life in near anonymity.

On August 11, 1949, as she crossed Peachtree Street with her husband on the way to see a movie, a speeding taxi struck her. She died five days later at just 48.

Margaret Mitchell left the world as she had entered its imagination — suddenly, unexpectedly, and entirely on her own terms. She wrote only one book, but that single act of creation reshaped American literature — and cinema — forever.

And it all began not with ambition or fame, but with pain, boredom, and a husband’s playful dare.

As John Marsh once said after her death, “She didn’t write Gone with the Wind to make history. She wrote it because she couldn’t sit still.”

#fblifestyle

These lines that scroll across the screen at the beginning of Gone With The Wind are revealing

"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...