Margaret Mitchell Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

MARGARET MITCHELL (1900-1949) had won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Gone With the Wind, the day before she wrote this letter. Mitchell, who had begun writing her epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction South in 1926, finally submitted her manuscript to Macmillian Company in 1935. Uncertain of its literary merit, she was delighted when they accepted it and launched a major advertising campaign while Mitchell reworked the manuscript. Mitchell was stunned when the book, released in 1936, sold over 1.3 million copies in its first year. EDWIN GRANBERRY, a book reviewer and critic with the New York "Evening Sun", had written the first review that Mitchell had read upon the release of GWTW (June 1936). Granberry compared her epic to Tolstoy's War and Peace and predicted its literary recognition by the Pulitzer Foundation. Mitchell was so impressed by the review that she wrote to thank him, pouring out her personal feelings about her book, which would be her only published novel, and beginning a lifelong friendship with Granberry and his wife, MABEL. She had been introduced to HERSHEL BRICKELL by Granberry. Bricknell was another literary critic who had praised her book, at a literary retreat at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to which she had been invited by Granberry, who felt she needed a refuge from her sudden fame. Mitchell faced another wave of public adulation in 1939, when the David O. Selznick film based on her novel was released.