This month's book club pick is MINE!! and it's Gone With the Wind. My all-time-super-duper-absolutely-most-favoritist-book-ever-written pick. It was the first real book I read (I was 10). By the time I graduated high school I'd read it eleven times. My obsession started with the movie. I still love the movie, but the book! The book is so much more. To see the movie and not read the book is like eating cheesecake without caramel sauce. It's like visiting Paris without seeing the Louvre.
My devotion to GWTW has been profound. When I was leaving home for school, I took my GWTW movie poster with me. Seeing this my dad said, "I bet cha by the time your first child is born, Gone With the Wind won't be as important to you." I took the bet, but made it for only five bucks because, although I denied it at the time, in my heart I knew he was right.
Authoress Margaret Mitchell at the Reminton portable typewriter she used to write her bookWho Knew? Who Cares? ME!
Margaret Mitchell...
...took 10 years to write Gone With the Wind. She started in 1926, it was published in 1936
...was a journalist, which was considered a "man's profession" in the early part of the last century
... knowledge of the Civil War was based on the oral history she received from her mother, grandmother and Civil War veterans who were frequently invited to her Grandmother's home for Sunday dinner
... was 10 years old before she found out the South lost the Civil War
...kept her manuscript a secret, covering it with towels when friends stopped by. Sometimes friends sat on the novel (unknowingly) because the apartment she shared with her husband was so small
...named her heroine Pansy O'Hara originally
