Gone with the Wind

  Happy birth anniversary to

"...novelist Margaret Mitchell, born in Atlanta (1900), author of Gone With the Wind, which won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize. Her father was president of the Atlanta Historical Society, and she grew up hearing tales of the Confederacy. Before writing her one novel, she was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal for six years, then spent 10 years researching and writing her panoramic tale of the Civil War and Reconstruction from a Southern point of view.

For many years, Gone with the Wind remained the greatest publishing success ever, selling a record 1,383,000 copies its first year (50,000 in a single day). The movie came out in 1939, won the Best Picture Academy Award the next spring, and went on to make more money than any other film for more than two decades. By the time Mitchell died at 48, after being hit by a taxi while crossing an Atlanta street, 8 million copies of her novel had been sold in 40 countries.

She was stunned by her book’s phenomenal success. In a thank-you note to a reviewer, she wrote: “I haven’t any literary style, and I know it, but have never been able to do anything about it. I am very conscious of my lack in this particular, and I was expecting more brickbats about it than any other thing.”

Writer's Almanac

Check out her biography sometime, it's incredibly interesting. BR

Mary Johnston

Nov. 21 is the birth anniversary

"... of American novelist Mary Johnston, (November 21, 1870 – May 9, 1936), born in Buchanan, Virginia. She was the first woman to top the best-seller list in the U.S. Her work was so popular that she supported herself throughout her life from her writing alone, and never married. Her book To Have and To Hold was the best-selling novel in the U.S. in 1900, and three of her novels were adapted to silent films.

Johnston wrote historical novels that often centered on love stories. Her novel on the Civil War, The Long Roll, told the story of Stonewall Jackson and the troops that fought under him. Although her characterization of General Jackson seems pretty sympathetic to modern readers, Stonewall Jackson’s widow published an editorial in the New York Times denouncing the book. She said that her late husband was presented as cold and eccentric, and took issue with Johnston’s claim that he liked “sucking lemons.” Although Johnston did speak out against lynching, her view of the confederacy was typical of other Southerners. Her father was a Civil War veteran and she was a friend of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind. Mitchell once said, “I hesitate to write about the South after having read Mary Johnston.”

Her book Hagar is considered one of the first feminist novels, and a lot of people stopped reading her work after she published it. She supported the women’s suffrage movement and founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. She argued before state legislatures in Virginia and Tennessee as part of her activism.

Johnston died at 65 at her home in Warm Springs, Virginia, which is now recognized as a historic site. Johnston’s novels are not widely read or studied now, but she’s remembered for being a hugely popular woman writer at a time when women were much less likely to get published.

Writer's Almanac 2017

Portrait of Mary Johnston no later than 1900 (from Wikipedia)