
Many people believe that Mitchell used her famous kin as the inspiration for Ashley Wilkes. There was another Southern legend in Margaret Mitchell's family: Old West gunslinger (and dentist) Doc Holliday was Mitchell's cousin by marriage. Speaking of name changes, early drafts of Gone With the Wind referred to Tara as “ Fountenoy Hall.” 6.

“We could call her ‘Garbage O’Hara’ for all I care,” Mitchell wrote to her friend and the book’s associate editor. “I just want to finish this damn thing.” 5. It probably would have stayed that way had the publisher not requested a name change. You know her as Scarlett now, but for years, the heroine of Gone with the Wind was named Pansy. She later regretted the act and sent the editor a telegram saying, “Have changed my mind. When a “friend” heard that she was considering writing a book (though in fact, it had been written), she said something to the effect of, “Imagine, you writing a book!” Annoyed, Mitchell took her massive manuscript to a Macmillan editor the next day. MITCHELL HAD NO INTENTION OF PUBLISHING THE BOOK.ĭespite spending 10 years of her life working on the tome, Mitchell didn’t really have much intention of publishing it. She went to extreme lengths to hide her work from friends and family, including hurriedly throwing a rug over pages scattered on her living room floor once when company showed up unexpectedly. Though Mitchell spent the next decade working on characters and plot development, almost no one knew she was writing a book. ALMOST NO ONE KNEW SHE WAS WRITING A BOOK. When the ankle proved slow to heal this time, she decided to occupy herself by writing. Mitchell was a journalist for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine when she took a leave to recover from “a series of injuries,” according to the Margaret Mitchell House, including a recurring ankle injury.

It was boredom that caused 25-year-old Margaret Mitchell to write 63 of the most beloved chapters in literary history. MARGARET MITCHELL WROTE THE BOOK OUT OF BOREDOM. In honor of its birthday, here are 10 things you might not have known about the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

On this day in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was published.
