Featured Books About Margaret Mitchell

The Museum Visitor's Center features exhibits about the life and times of Margaret Mitchell, including "A Born Writer: 1907-1918" and "A Woman in A Man's World." These two exhibits are expounded in books that include her girlhood writings and her newspaper articles written for the Atlanta Journal.

Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell

Recently discovered stories, novellas, plays, journal entries and letters have been woven together to create a new book, Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell, published by Hill Street Press in May 2000 ($21.95) and edited by Jane Eskridge. The manuscripts for the book were found in the basement of an Atlanta home where a relative of Margaret's, by marriage, lived. Childhood photographs, depicting this young girl as adorable, fun-loving, spirited, tomboyish and flirtatious, complete this exhibit. Book now for sale at the Margaret Mitchell House Museum Shop.

"Children of all ages can identify with Margaret's aspirations and her desire to share adventure, creativity and drama with her neighborhood friends, who would act out these works on the front porch of her Peachtree home," says Mary Rose Taylor, executive director of the Margaret Mitchell House. "This exhibit provides insight in the development of a writer who would begin writing the world's best-selling novel (second only to the Bible) some eight years later."

Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia

Julian Granberry - Letters From Margaret

Letters From Margaret (signed copies available in the Margaret Mitchell House gift shop)

Even before the time of her death in 1949, Margaret Mitchell, like all instant celebrities, faced the scrutiny of the media. Credited with many personality traits she did not have and quoted as saying things which she never said, the celebrity spotlight insisted on giving Miss Mitchell a notoriety she did not cherish.

To gain insight into the real Margaret Mitchell, one must read her own words, which are newly published in Letters From Margaret. These letters were written to the Granberrys as her closest friends outside of Atlanta, and saved by Julian Granberry's father, Edwin. Edwin was instructed that it was important they be saved to dispel the false "Margaret Legend", but not to make them public until Miss Mitchell had been gone for at least fifty years.

Margaret Mitchell, Reporter

Look for Margaret Mitchell, Reporter (Hill Street Press) to be on the book shelves, featuring fifty columns that present a never-before-seen picture of a lively, far-ranging mind and an insightful observer well on the way to her full literary power long before the world even knew her name.

Margaret Mitchell Reporter Just a few years before the novelist Margaret Mitchell conceived the immortal fictive world of Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell, the reporter, was pounding the real-life streets of her Atlanta hometown in search of the who, what, when, and where for her popular weekly columns in the Atlanta Journal. Showing the pluck that would have made her recently deceased suffragette mother proud, 22-year-old Mitchell set to work as one of the first woman columnists at the magazine.

Defying convention, the carefully raised ex-debutante daily took the Peachtree streetcar to the spittoon-filled, hard-swearing offices of the big city newspaper to "hunt and peck" out her weekly columns on an Underwood typewriter, then already so old it had no backspace. The shortest-statured in the office of cigar-chomping men in sweaty shirtsleeves, Mitchell had to bring her own hacksaw to work to shorten the legs on the kitchen chair the AJC provided her for seating.

From 1922 until she resigned due to ill health in 1926, Mitchell completed dozens of articles, interviews, sketches, and think pieces. Mitchell collected her favorite pieces from those years into her personal scrapbooks (now preserved in the Hargrett Rare Book Library at the University of Georgia); the pieces collected in Margaret Mitchell, Reporter--only a small handful of which have appeared in print again since their original publication--are the best of what the author herself considered her most interesting work.