MARGARET MITCHELL - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 01/04/1937 - HFSID 55680

MARGARET MITCHELL
Writing the year she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind, Mitchell writes to Edwin Granberry, who had written the first glowing review of the novel and would become her dear friend. She is eager to meet Collier's fiction editor Kenneth Littauer, who is visiting Granberry. Granberry has typed his own explanatory note in the lower margin.
Typed Letter signed: "Margaret", 1 page, 7x11. Atlanta, Georgia, 1937 January 4. To ""Dear Edwin", in full: "Just a hasty line to tell you how glad I am that you and Mr. Littauer are coming. And something else I intended to ask was when I was in Winter Park - have you a carbon of a letter I wrote to Herschel's [Herschel Brickell] a couple of months ago and sent to you? I can not find it in my files and I find a notation that I sent it to you with a request for its return. If you have it, will you bring it up with you? If you haven't it, then I imagine it has been returned and I put it in the wrong file. I write so many letters that I have to keep carbon copies for fear I will bore my friends with reporting stale information. Let us know the time of your arrival. Best to you and Mable. Mitchell's handwritten addition: "also Mr. Littauer". Granberry has added his own typed note in the lower margin: "Kenneth Littauer, fiction editor of Collier's, was anxious to meet Margaret. She phoned me to bring him up to Atlanta where the three of us discussed the article I was doing on Margaret. E. G."MARGARET MITCHELL MARSH (1900-1949), a native of Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded the 1937 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Gone With the Wind, her epic novel set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction South. At first uncertain about her book's literary merit, she had submitted her manuscript to Macmillan Company in 1935. Mitchell was stunned -- and thrust into the public spotlight -- when the book sold over 1.3 million copies in its first year. It remained on the best-seller list for 21 weeks, enjoying resurgence in sales with the release of the 1939 film based on the novel. EDWIN GRANBERRY, a freelance book reviewer and critic, had reviewed her book in a glowing and unprecedented 1,200-word piece in the New York "Evening Sun" on June 30, 1936, the day of the book's publication. Mitchell had been so impressed by the report, which compared her book to Tolstoy's War and Peace, that she had written to thank him. Her letter started a lifelong correspondence -- and a friendship between the two couples: Margaret and her husband, John Marsh, and Edwin (a Southerner himself) and his wife, Mabel. Margaret and John first met the Granberrys at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the summer campus of Florida's Rollins College, where Granberry was a Professor of English. It was during this visit that she had agreed to accept $50,000 in movie rights for her book pending contract negotiations with producer David O. Selznick (against Granberry's advice). Granberry was himself a noted author, a winner of the O'Henry Award for best short story. Because of the insatiable demand for news about her, Mitchell had asked Granberry to write an "official" article about her. The article, "The Private Life of Margaret Mitchell", would appear in "Collier's" on March 13, 1937. KENNETH LITTAUER, as noted in this correspondence, was fiction editor of the then widely circulated Collier's magazine. Mitchell met HERSCHEL BRICKELL, a literary critic from Ridgefield, Connecticut, and his wife, Norma, at a writers' retreat at Blowing Rock in August 1936. Brickell had also written a publication day review of Gone With the Wind in the "New York Post", calling the book a "striking piece of literature." Toned and creased. Unknown residue at left edge. Multiple notches at edges. Signature in fine condition.