The Writer Margaret Mitchell

Unless you are very young, or were raised by wolves in the heart of the wilderness, you have heard of the bestselling novel, turned big screen movie, Gone With the Wind. But do you know anything about the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell?

Her home town was Atlanta, Georgia, where she grew up in a family of attorneys. She stayed living in her childhood city of Atlanta with her husband in a cramped one bedroom apartment that she called, “the dump”(source:Joanna Arietta, director of historic houses for the Atlanta History Center and Margaret Mitchell House). She not only wrote a bestselling novel, in their small living space, her only published novel, but she also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her effort. An effort that she undertook on a secondhand 1923 Remington typewriter, which  is on display at the Atlanta Fulton County Central Library at One Margaret Mitchell Square.

Mitchell had a very set idea on what her style of writing should and should not be, as she said, “I sweat blood to make my style simple and stripped bare.” It is this simplicity of style that helped make her novel so popular. It was a style instilled in her by her family; though their writing was in the field of law. The fancy, pretentious way of writing, where one cannot cross the room without getting lost, was a style she fought to “strip bare.”

You can read more about Margaret Mitchell and her writing style on the NPR website .