Beschreibung:

MITCHELL, MARGARET. Typed letter signed ("Margaret Mitchell Marsh") to Martha Angley. Atlanta, 2 April 1936. 5½ pages, 4to, on both sides of three sheets, double-spaced, with several autograph corrections, with original envelope with typed address, both letter and envelope laminated, some margins with slight discoloration. HOW "GONE WITH THE WIND" CAME TO BE WRITTEN. An exceptional letter in which Mitchell essentially gives the story of her life, telling of the writing and the sale of her famous novel of the South and the Civil War. "...I was born here in Atlanta and I am not giving the date of my birth [she was born in 1900]...I came to maturity during the high tide of the Jazz Age if that helps you date me. My father and mother were born here in Atlanta and my grandparents lived in the neighborhood before Atlanta was founded and moved into the town shortly after the town got started...The old people remember and recount things their grandparents told them and so when I was a child it seemed that Lee must have surrendered only last week...the memories of the stories my elders told me has been of great value to me in the writing of my own book which covers the period between 1861 and 1873 in Atlanta and the rural section about it..." Over the next two pages Mitchell gives an account of her education (at Washington Seminary and Smith College) and her newspaper job on the Atlanta Journal , and records her marriage to John Marsh in 1925. Shortly after her marriage she became an invalid (because of an ankle injury) for three years. "...my family and friends were unable to keep me supplied with literature...So, purely to divert myself, I started writing the book which is now called Gone With the Wind . As I wrote it purely to please and occupy myself and with no idea of ever selling it, I wrote exactly what I wanted to write with no eye on the literary market. I wrote it out of the thousands of memories of what the old folks had told me and the thousands of books I had read on Southern history of that period. I did not enjoy writing it, I do not enjoy writing anything. I write slowly and with infinite pain, groanings, despair. I am always afflicted when writing with a violent desire to be somewhere else...Over a period of about five years, I think, I wrote whenever pain did not prevent me. Then I began to get well and, when I could walk again, the world was too beautiful a place to bother with writing. So the book, minus a first chapter, minus seven chapters in the middle and two near the end was never finished...I never thought of finishing it and trying to sell it because it wasn't written to sell and it never occurred to me that anyone except myself could possibly be interested in it...At the time when I was writing on the book, the tough, hard boiled some what vulgar 'realistic' type of fiction was in vogue and the very idea of a book with a historical background selling was simply laughable." "Last Spring," Mitchell continues, "an editor from Macmillan Company was in town and I was given the job of showing him our dog wood and digging up Atlanta authors and would-be authors for him. I showed him authors and dog wood. I lugged authors all day long and presented them to him. And as the shades of the eve were closing in he asked if I had ever written anything myself and when I said yes, he asked to see it. I didn't think it would interest a publisher as it was written purely for my own edification and I told him so. But I later became childishly annoyed over a friend who remarked that it must be pretty lousy if I'd never submitted it to a publisher so I gave it to him and he bought it, minus chapters, full of interlineations, covered with coffee and jam stains and dust. The shock was so great that I had to go to bed for several days with nervous indigestion -- Well, that's my life story..." Mitchell goes on to tell of the Macmillan editor, Mr. Latham, who "discovered" her and his interest in Southern authors, and closes: "...Mis