Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell

                         MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL



                                                                    32 group
                                                              Blus Alexander

                                  Kiev 2003
MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL was born in   November  8,  1900,  Atlanta  .She
died in Aug. 16, 1949. Atlanta in full MARGARET MUNNERLYN MITCHELL  American
author of the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind.Mitchell  attended
Washington Seminary in her native  Atlanta,  Georgia,  before  enrolling  at
Smith College in 1918. When her mother died  the  next  year,  she  returned
home. Between 1922 and 1926 she was a writer and reporter  for  the  Atlanta
Journal. After an ankle injury in 1926 she left the paper and, for the  next
10 years, worked slowly  on  a  romantic  novel  about  the  Civil  War  and
Reconstruction as seen from a Southern point of  view.  The  novel  featured
Scarlett O'Hara, a strong-willed  coquette  and  jezebel.  From  her  family
Mitchell had absorbed the history of the South, the tragedy of the war,  and
the romance of the  Lost  Cause.  She  worked  at  her  novel  sporadically,
composing episodes out of sequence and  later  fitting  them  together.  She
apparently had little thought of publication at first,  and  for  six  years
after it was substantially finished  the  novel  lay  unread.  But  in  1935
Mitchell was persuaded to submit her manuscript for publication.It  appeared
in 1936 as Gone with the Wind (quoting a line  from  the  poem  'Cynara'  by
Ernest Dowson). Within six months 1,000,000 copies  had  been  sold;  50,000
copies were sold in one day. It went on to sell more copies than  any  other
novel in U.S. publishing history, with sales passing  12  million  by  1965,
and was eventually translated into 25 languages and sold  in  40  countries.
It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The  motion-picture  rights  were
sold for $50,000. The film,  starring  Vivien  Leigh  and  Clark  Gable  and
produced by David O. Selznick, premiered in Atlanta in December  1939  after
an  unprecedented  period  of  advance  promotion,  including   the   highly
publicized search for an actress to play Scarlett. It won nine major  Oscars
and two special Oscars at the Academy Awards and for two decades reigned  as
the top moneymaking film of all time. Mitchell, who never  adjusted  to  the
celebrity that had befallen her and who never attempted another  book,  died
after an automobile accident in 1949. Four decades after  Mitchell's  death,
her estate permitted the writing of a sequel by Alexandra Ripley,  Scarlett:
The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the  Wind'  (1991),  which  was
generally unfavourably appraised by critics.