Gifted but enigmatic Atlanta magazine writer Margaret Mitchell earned the Pulitzer Prize in Novels for her breathtaking work of historical fiction, “Gone with the Wind,” on this day in history, May 3, 1937.
“Mitchell received news of the prize by phone, along with multiple requests for interviews,” reports PBS American Masters.
“Hating publicity, she fled to a gospel concert at a small Black church in Atlanta with her husband and close associates. The press scoured the city but never found her.”
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MAY 2, 1611, KING JAMES BIBLE PUBLISHED, HELPED FUEL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN COLONIES
She dodged attention, and future authorship, the rest of her brief life.
“Gone with the Wind,” Mitchell’s 1,000-page Civil War saga, is one of the world’s most successful novels. Even today, it enjoys a global following/
The drama of love and total warfare in the American South inspired a motion picture epic of the same name that remains one of the most celebrated films in Hollywood history.
“I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back.” — Ashley Wilkes, “Gone with the Wind”
“I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears,” Ashley Wilkes, the debonair object of headstrong heroine Scarlett O’Hara’s affection, says in one of the book’s signature passages.
The statement likely reflected stories that Mitchell absorbed as a child in a city that was reduced to ashes in 1864.
“Born in Atlanta in 1900, Margaret Mitchell grew up surrounded by relatives who told endless tales of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” states her biography on the website of Georgia Women of Achievement.
“She knew those who were relics of a destroyed culture, and those who had put aside gentility for survival.”
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Her grandfather, Russell Mitchell, fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He was shot…
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