The author of the best-selling novel of all time, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, was born Nov. 8, 1900 in Atlanta to a family with ancestry not unlike the O'Haras of Gone With the Wind.
Her mother, Mary Isabelle "Maybelle" Stephens was of Irish-Catholic ancestry. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, an Atlanta attorney, descended from Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots. The family included many soldiers -- members of the family had fought in the American Revolution, Irish uprisings and rebellions and the Civil War.
The imaginative child was fascinated with stories of the Civil War that she heard first from her parents and great aunts, who lived at the family's Jonesboro rural home, and later, from grizzled (and sometimes profane) Confederate veterans who regaled the girl with battlefield stories as Margaret, astride her pony, rode through the countryside around Atlanta with the men.
"She was a great friend of my cousin," recalled Atlanta resident Mrs. Colquitt Carter. "My cousin always said that when Peggy would spend the night, she would get up in the middle of the night and write things. She was always obsessed with expressing herself."
The family lived in a series of homes, including a stately home on Peachtree Street beginning in 1912. Young Margaret attended private school, but was not an exceptional student. When, on one memorable day, she announced to her mother that she could not understand mathematics and would not return to school, Maybelle Mitchell dragged her daughter to a rural road where plantation houses had fallen into ruin.
"It's happened before and it will happen again," Maybelle sternly lectured the girl. "And when it does happen, everyone loses everything and everyone is equal. They all start again with nothing at all except the cunning of their brain and the strength of their hands."
Chastened, Margaret Mitchell returned to school, eventually entering Smith College in the fall of 1918, not long after the United States entered World War I. Her fiancee, Clifford Henry, was killed in action in France. In January 1919, Maybelle Mitchell died during a flu epidemic and Margaret left college to take charge of the Atlanta household for her father and her older brother, Stephens.
Although she made her society debut in 1920, Margaret was far too free-spirited and intellectual to be content with the life of a debutante. She quarreled with her fellow debs over the proper distribution of the money they had raised for charity, and she scandalized Atlanta society with a provocative dance she performed at the debutante ball with a male student from Georgia Tech.
By 1922, Margaret Mitchell was a headstrong "flapper" pursued by two men, an ex-football player and bootlegger, Berrien "Red" Upshaw, and a lanky newspaperman, John R. Marsh. She chose Upshaw, and the two were married in September. Upshaw's irregular income led her to seek a job, at a salary of $25 per week, as a writer for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine where Marsh was an editor and her mentor.
"There was an excitement in newspapering in the 1920s," famed editor Ralph McGill recalled. Margaret Mitchell, he said, "was a vibrant, vital person -- excited, always, and seeking excitement. And this excitement, I think, was a sort of a hallmark of the 20s."
The Upshaw marriage was stormy and short lived. They divorced in October 1924, and less than a year later, she married Marsh. The two held their wedding reception at their new ground-floor apartment at 979 Crescent Avenue -- a house which Margaret affectionately nicknamed "the Dump."
Only months after their marriage, Margaret left her job at the Journal to convalesce from a series of injuries. It was during this period that she began writing the book that would make her world famous.
Gone With the Wind was published in June 1936. Margaret Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her sweeping novel in May 1937. The novel was made into an equally famous motion picture starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. The movie had its world premiere at the Lowe's Grand Theater in Atlanta, Dec. 15, 1939 with Margaret Mitchell and all of the stars in attendance.
On Aug. 11, 1949, while crossing the intersection of Peachtree and 13th -- only three blocks from "the Dump", Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding taxi. She died five days later and is buried in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery with other members of her family.
Margaret Mitchell and Black Atlanta
Although the details of Margaret Mitchell's public life are well known, there was a secret life which only recently surfaced with the discovery of Margaret Mitchell's extraordinary involvement with Atlanta's African American community.At a time when segregation was the law of the land and the Ku Klux Klan regularly held rallies at nearby Stone Mountain, Margaret Mitchell was working on several projects with black Atlantans, notably involving medical education.
Her involvement with the African American community began when Peggy was a 19-year-old debutante. She was the only one of her debutante group who chose to work in the city's black clinics. This was a reason why she was rejected from the Junior League.
In 1941, Dr. Benjamin Mays had come to historically black Morehouse College as its new president and sought help for promising students. The first person he approached was Margaret Mitchell. Despite the stern admonitions she had received from her parents about hoarding money in time of war, Margaret agreed to an anonymous donation of $80, enough at that time to put a student through one year of school.
When Dr. Mays wrote her a letter describing, in detail, the impact her gift had on its young recipient, the novelist decided to arrange her finances to make these contributions a regular event. Dr. Mays agreed to keep the scholarship fund a secret, and did so for many years after her death.
The fund came to light when Dr. Otis Smith, the first African-American in the state of Georgia to be certified as a pediatrician, approached Mary Rose Taylor, chairman of Margaret Mitchell House, Inc., with the story.
Dr. Smith, who also is a past president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, had been a first-year student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., when his money ran out. Despite his years of work as a teacher, shoe shiner, and field hand, he told Dr. Mays he simply had no more money. Mays sent him back to Nashville, and said cryptically, "Don't worry about a thing. I'll take care of it."
His tuition and fees were completely paid, but it was 35 years later (and Margaret Mitchell had long ago died) before Dr. Mays revealed the source of the gift -- one of about 40 to 50 Margaret Mitchell had made to African American medical students.
Her interest in Atlanta's black community was again made evident when it was also revealed that she supported the early efforts to desegregate the city's police department.
