Margaret Mitchell and “The Dump”
The 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Margaret Mitchell, an Atlanta housewife and former journalist for the compelling Civil War-era saga, Gone with the Wind. The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum is a highlight of Atlanta tours. The house, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was affectionately dubbed “The Dump” by Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh in the 1920s. Today, the renovated historic home features tours, author lectures, workshops summer writing camps and exclusive Gone with the Wind exhibitions.
Born in 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia, Mitchell soon became known for her fascination with the Civil War stories told by local Confederate veterans. An imaginative and spirited young woman, Mitchell attended Atlanta’s Washington Seminary, a private school for society’s finest. There, Mitchell was known for playing male roles in school’s dramatic productions and writing short stories featuring brave young heroines. A woman unafraid to speak her mind, Mitchell left the South for Smith College. Tragically, she soon learned her fiance had been killed in France and just a few months later, her mother succumbed to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
After less than a year of studies, Mitchell left New England to return to the South and take her place in Atlanta society and as the head of her mother’s household. In 1925, after a brief and unhappy first marriage — during which she worked as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal — Mitchell married her former husband’s best man, and settled in Apartment 1 of the Crescent Apartments, a three-story Tudor Revival house built around the time of Mitchell’s birth. The once-stately private residence had fallen victim first to poor property management, and then to the stock market crash of 1929.
Soon after the couple’s move to the storied Midtown apartment in 1925, Mitchell was forced to quit her job at the paper to convalesce from broken ankle. It was during this period that she began writing the book that would prop up broken coffee tables before making her famous. In 1932, one of the last tenants to leave the Crescent Apartments, Mitchell and her husband packed the nearly completed manuscript into a suitcase and moved a larger apartment a few blocks away.
After nearly a decade of hidden scribbling — the unconventional Mitchell didn’t want her friends and family to know that she was hard at work at one of the century’s most influential and sweeping novels — her epic work was published in June of 1936. Just three years later, her words would come to vibrant life on the big screen in the equally famous film starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.
Given the tremendous financial success of the novel and motion picture, Mitchell had the financial resources to support a number of philanthropic interests and service organizations. During World War II, she sold war bonds, was active in Home Defense, volunteered for the Red Cross and wrote letters for U.S. soldiers serving overseas.
Sadly, one evening while crossing Peachtree Street with her husband, Mitchell was struck by a drunk driver on August 11, 1949. She never regained consciousness and died at Grady hospital five days later. She is buried in Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery.
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