The book that steadied the sofa

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. 

Up next: The WORLD History Book.

Over the span of ten years—beginning one hundred years ago—author Margaret Mitchell started a novel she never expected to finish. It became America’s best selling novel of all time.

WORLD’s George Grant has the story.

GEORGE GRANT: One hundred years ago, while laid up at home with a sprained ankle, Margaret Mitchell began writing a sprawling epic about the Civil War on a Remington Portable typewriter, a gift from her husband.

In a PBS documentary, biographer Darden Pyron says she worked in secret.

DARDEN PYRON: When somebody would drop in, one of her friends would drop in, she’d throw a tea towel over a typewriter so that people couldn’t see what she was doing.

Mitchell was a sixth generation Southerner whose grandfathers had both fought in the war, so she grew up with stories of the valor and the tragedy of that titanic conflict. 

She had been writing stories as long as she could remember, inspired by the historical tales of G.A. Henty and Edward Stratemeyer. Later, she honed her narrative skills as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal.

Pyron says this new book was a passion project.

PYRON: She clearly had the great plot outline in her mind before she started writing. It was like she had a kind of vision.

She worked on it off and on for the next three years. But leaving the manuscript unfinished, eventually using its bulk to prop up a wobbly sofa, she had no thought of publishing it. 

Fate, however, would intervene. 

In April 1935, Harold Latham, a New York editor for Macmillan, visited Atlanta scouting for new talent. A staffer for the Atlanta Sunday Magazine suggested he contact Mitchell, so he invited her to lunch. He asked if she had ever written a book.

John Wiley is an author and historian.

WILEY: At first she said she didn’t even have a book, didn’t want to talk to him. Finally, he kept on and she admitted, well, she was working on something, but it wasn’t ready to be seen.

But then, Mitchell had a change of heart. She gathered up the tattered and disheveled pages and delivered them to Latham saying, “Take these before I change my mind.”

WILEY: When Harold Latham took the manuscript, he says he had to go buy an extra suitcase, it was so large. He also commented that it was the worst manuscript he had ever seen. 

On the train to New Orleans the next day, he began to read the work and was immediately captivated. 

After he agreed to publish the book, Mitchell worked for another six months checking the historical references and rewriting the opening chapter several times. 

Gone with the Wind was published on June 30, 1936. And the rest is history.

Pat Conroy is an author whose own novels were influenced by Mitchell.

PAT CONROY: The entire country went crazy. The book caused an explosion at book stores. They could not keep them in book stores. 

Indeed, the novel was a runaway sensation, topping best seller lists for the next several years and winning the Pulitzer Prize. 

It was adapted into the 1939 Hollywood blockbuster starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Haviland, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard. It won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, and it continues to be heralded as one of the greatest films of all time.

SCARLETT O’HARA: Fiddledeedee! War, war, war! This war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream!

The story begins in 1861, on the eve of the first wave of Southern secessions from the Union. It ends twelve years later in the bitter waning days of Reconstruction. 

The plot follows a host of vividly drawn characters and their tangled romances, shattered expectations, and battlefield horrors.

RHETT BUTLER: Has the war started?

O’HARA: Sir, you, you should have made your presence known.

BUTLER: Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.

O’HARA: Sir, you are no gentleman!

BUTLER: And you, miss, are no lady!

Graft and greed stand side by side with virtue and valor, hypocrisy and scandal alongside integrity and honor, faithfulness and resolution alongside infidelity and iniquity—just like life. 

Written on an epic scale akin to the sagas of Dickens, Scott, and Dostoyevsky, it is, like them, very much a book of its time and place—likely to rankle our modern moral sensibilities about history and class and race. 

Even so, there is no denying that the writing is sometimes soaring, sometimes sparkling, sometimes sublime. The plot moves along without lagging across almost a thousand pages. The descriptions are indelibly picturesque. The characters, unforgettable.

Mitchell asserted, “I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter.”

She actually wrote the heart-wrenching climactic scene first:

O’HARA: Rhett! Rhett! Rhett! Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?

BUTLER: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a...

Amidst deep despair there was yet a glimmer of hope.

O’HARA: After all … tomorrow is another day.

There is a reason Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind has sold more than thirty million copies. The book is a genuine classic.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m George Grant.

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