Book Description
This definitive biography of the author of Gone With the Wind offers a perceptive psychological analysis of the novel and a concise study of the book's shifting critical fortunes in the contemporary South. The life of "Peggy" Mitchell, from her birth in the highest reaches of aristocratic Atlanta in 1900 to her death in 1949 in a car accident, is detailed in a manner that is sympathetic yet wholly objective. A fascinating mass of contradictions, Mitchell emerges here as alternately retiring and flirty, as a Southern belle confident enough to enter Atlanta's worst prisons and slums during her journalism career at the Atlanta Journal, and as an intensely private person who nonetheless answered every fan letter herself. The breadth of this biography is vast, ranging from the intimate-including the astonishing real-life model for Rhett Butler-to the global-exploring the intense responses to the book from people all over the world who continue to see an image of their own political struggles in Mitchell's depiction of bravery in defense of a lost cause.
About the Author
Darden Asbury Pyron is a professor of history at Florida International University in Miami. He is the author of Liberace: An American Boy and Recasting: Gone With the Wind in American Culture. He lives in Miami, Florida.
Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone with the Wind FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this solidly researched narrative, Darden Ashbury Pyron delivers the definitive biography of Margaret Mitchell, a perceptive psychological analysis of her novel Gone With the Wind, and a study of the book's shifting critical fortunes in the contemporary South. From her birth in the highest reaches of aristocratic Atlanta in 1900 to her death in 1949 in a car accident, Pyron reveals Mitchell as a mass of contradictions, alternately retiring and flirty. She was gutsy enough to enter Atlanta's worst prisons and slums during her journalism career and consistently advocate for philanthropy to African-American causes." Mitchell worked obsessively on her novel for a decade but had so little faith in her talent that she kept her work secret from all but her husband. Surprising to those who know only the film version of the masterpiece, Pyron reveals how she intended her book as a repudiation of the then-popular "moonlight-and-magnolias" strain of Southern literature. His biography at once casts Mitchell in a new light and further tells the story of the making of the film and the impact that ultimately had upon Mitchell.
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