Works by
Margaret Mitchell
(Aka Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell)
(Writer)
[November 8, 1900 - August 16, 1949]

Chidlren's Books

• Lost Laysen (1996)
  Until recently, the odd thought Margaret Mitchell had only one story to tell: Gone With the Wind. Now meet a heroine to match Scarlett: Courtenay Ross, a feisty, independent-minded woman, and the two men -- one a cool-headed, well-heeled gentleman, the other a hot-blooded, pugnacious sailor -- who adore her. A tale of yearning, valor, and devotion, Lost Laysen enthralls from its delightful beginning to its unforgettable end.
  
  Equally intriguing is the story behind the story -- the real-life romance that inspired Mitchell: how she gave the original manuscript as a gift to her beau. Henry Love Angel, and how the manuscript, along with Mitchell's intimate letters and treasured photographs, were lovingly safeguarded only to be discovered decades later in a shoebox!
  
  Lost Laysen is pure magic, a gift for us to cherish from America's most beloved storyteller.

Fiction

• Gone with the Wind (1936)
  Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time.
  
  Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. None take us into the burning fields and cities of the American South as Gone With the Wind does, creating haunting scenes and thrilling portraits of characters so vivid that we remember their words and feel their fear and hunger for the rest of our lives.
  
  In the two main characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, contemptuous Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless story of survival under the harshest of circumstances, she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

  
  Movie:

Other

• Margaret Mitchell, Reporter (2002) by Margaret Mitchell with  Patrick Allen
  The 64 columns in Margaret Mitchell, Reporter present a never-before-seen portrait of the lively, far-ranging mind and an insightful observer well on the way to her full literary power long before the world even knew her name. More than a decade before Margaret Mitchell the novelist conceived the immortal fictional world of her now legendary and hotly debated novel, Mitchell the reporter was pounding the real-life streets of her native Atlanta in search of the who, what, when, and where for her popular column in the Atlanta Journal. Defying convention, the recent debutante shook things up as one of the first female columnists for the South's largest newspaper. From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell completed hundreds of articles, profiles, columns, interviews, sketches, and book reviews, the best of which are now compiled for the first time. Mitchell's journalism transcends the simple fact-gathering of a seasoned journalist to provide a compelling snapshot of life in the Jazz Age South.

• Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind Letters, 1936-1946 (1976)

See also:

• Scarlett (1991, 2007) by Alexandra Ripley with Stephens Mitchell
  The timeless tale continues...Alexandra Ripley brings us back to Tara and reintroduces us to the characters we remember so well: Rhett, Ashley, Mammy, Suellen, Aunt Pittypat, and, of course, Scarlett. As the classic story, first told over half a century ago, moves forward, the greatest love affair in all fiction is reignited. Amidst heartbreak and joy, the endless, consuming passion between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler reaches its startling culmination. Rich with surprises at every turn and new emotional, breathtaking adventures, Scarlett satisfies our longing to reenter the world of Gone With the Wind, and like its predecessor, Scarlett will find an eternal place in our hearts.

• Lost in Yesterday (2006) by Peter Bonner
  "Lost in Yesterday is an intriguing journey back to the genesis of Gone With The Wind and the folklore surrounding the characters in the book, the locale of many events, and the myths that have endured about Tara and Margaret Mitchell's own family. Bonner's "tour" answers many questions and poses new and interesting ones. Written with stylish charm, he invites us to join him in his quest for the true story of the epic book and in his love for the deep South during its most terrible times."  -- Ann Kempner Fisher, Literary Editor & former Hollywood Script Consultant

• Scarlett O'Hara Can Go To Hell (2006) by Miriam K Center

• Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone With the Wind (2004) by Darden Asbury Pyron
  This definitive biography of the author of Gone With the Wind offers a perceptive psychological analysis of the novel and a concise study of the book's shifting critical fortunes in the contemporary South. The life of "Peggy" Mitchell, from her birth in the highest reaches of aristocratic Atlanta in 1900 to her death in 1949 in a car accident, is detailed in a manner that is sympathetic yet wholly objective. A fascinating mass of contradictions, Mitchell emerges here as alternately retiring and flirty, as a Southern belle confident enough to enter Atlanta's worst prisons and slums during her journalism career at the Atlanta Journal, and as an intensely private person who nonetheless answered every fan letter herself. The breadth of this biography is vast, ranging from the intimate-including the astonishing real-life model for Rhett Butler-to the global-exploring the intense responses to the book from people all over the world who continue to see an image of their own political struggles in Mitchell's depiction of bravery in defense of a lost cause.

• Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell (2002), Janet Eskridge, ed.
  Discovered one sultry summer in an Atlanta basement full of sixty years' worth of accumulated debris, the writing of a young Margaret Mitchell reveals a prodigious and inspirational talent for such a young girl. The writer, who would later pen the bestselling book of all time after the Bible (and one that still sells over 200,000 copies every year around the world), was a precocious, imaginative, headstrong, female rebel who was, despite her disposition, as distracted by everyday concerns about parental approval and social insecurities as any child. Nevertheless, as shown in the pages of I Want to Be Famous, Margaret Mitchell was amazingly talented and displayed this through her writing of letters, journals, short stories, and one-act plays (later staged in her midtown Atlanta home). From westerns and shipwreck tales to stories of scalawags and musings on her best friends and boys, Mitchell demonstrated a finesse for challenging authority and striking out on her own-personality traits not surprising for the society debutante who was later rejected by the Junior League of Atlanta because of a racy dance she performed at one of their "balls," and an author who would later cope with the pressures of international fame measured against her personal mission as a major philanthropist for African American causes in racially divided Atlanta. Mitchell's is a story of youthful independence and talent; the real story of "girl power" long before its modern-day popularization. Fully illustrated and including 28 recently discovered writings, this collection is perfect for any young or teenage girl who aspires to be a writer.

• Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind (1993, 2000) by Marianne Walker
  THIS GROUNDBREAKING BIOGRAPHY of Margaret Mitchell and her husband John Marsh reveals the significant role he played in the creation of Gone With the Wind. Originally published in 1993 to great acclaim, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh is now available in a new edition, featuring a new preface by the author, to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Mitchell's birthday. Based on more than 200 previously unpublished letters and extensive interviews with their closest associates, Walker's biography of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh offers a new look into a devoted marriage and fascinating partnership that ultimately created a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In telling the private story of the remarkable marriage of Mitchell and Marsh, author Marianne Walker has paid long-deserved attention to Marsh and his significant role in the creation of Gone With the Wind.

• The Private Diary of Scarlett O'Hara (1996) by C. E. Crimmins and Thomas Maeder

• Gone with the Wind (1994) by Gail Rae

• Looking for Tara: The Gone With The Wind Guide to Margaret Mitchell's Atlanta (1994) by Don O'Briant

• Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (1991) by Darden Asbury Pyron
  Gone With the Wind is an American phenomenon. Arguably the most popular American novel of all time, it sold over a million copies in its first six months (in the heart of the Depression), won a Pulitzer Prize for its author, and more remarkable still, returned to the New York Times Best Seller list fifty years after its first appearance. Crowning its glory, David O. Selznick transformed the novel into one of the great films of all time, lifting its characters--especially the unforgettable Scarlett O'Hara and her lover-antagonist Rhett Butler--to the pinnacle of American popular culture. Now, in Southern Daughter, Darden Pyron provides an absorbing biography of Margaret Mitchell, the author of this American classic. In a solidly researched, sprightly narrative informed by a deep knowledge of Southern culture, Pyron reveals a woman of unconventional beauty, born into one of Atlanta's most prominent families, and imbued from childhood with tales of the Civil War. Mitchell was a rebellious child, an independent woman who wanted a career and not a family (children made her wince), and a Catholic who defiantly left the Church, divorced her first husband, Red Upshaw (a ne'er-do-well and sometime bootlegger), and married John Marsh (who had been Upshaw's best man). Fans of Gone With the Wind will find several chapters in Southern Daughter that trace how these elements in Mitchell's biography made their way into her fiction, including the most surprising identity for the fictional Rhett Butler. As a further surprise to most Americans who know only the film version of Gone With the Wind, Pyron reveals how Mitchell intended her book as a repudiation of the then popular "moonlight on the magnolias" genre of Civil War romance. Equally interesting is his portrait of Mitchell after the novel's success: the incredible flood of letters (in the 13 years before her death, Mitchell wrote at least ten thousand letters, an astonishing number of which ran pages and pages); the filming of Gone With the Wind, whose script ultimately required seventeen writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht; and the lavish film premier in Atlanta. Whether describing Mitchell's earliest writing (such as The Cow Puncher and Phil Kelley, Detective, in which she played Zara the female crook), or discussing her final years, which were marred by constant pain and illness, wrangles with agents and publisher, and her increasing affection for litigation, this perceptive, sympathetic, and engagingly written biography illuminates the life of a major writer and the book she created, a work peopled with characters who still loom large in the American imagination.

• Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans (1989) by Helen Taylor

• Recasting: Gone With the Wind in American Culture (1983) by Darden Asbury Pyron
  This collection of essays comments on the pre-World War II culture of the United States, when David O. Selznick produced the movie.

• Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (1983) by Anne Edwards

• Strange tales of Gone With the Wind: 101 Things You Never Knew About GWTW But Were Afraid to Ask (1980) by Austin McDermott

• Scarlett Fever: The Ultimate Pictorial Treasury of Gone With the Wind -- Featuring the Collection of Herb Bridges (1977) by William Pratt

• Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone With the Wind (1965) by Finis Farr