Here is how she later described her life’s labor: “When I look back on these last years of struggling to find time to write between deaths in the family, illness in the family and among friends which lasted months and even years, childbirths (not my own), divorces and neuroses among friends, my own ill health and four fine auto accidents. She accumulated thousands of pages of manuscript. Over the next eight years she painstakingly researched for historical accuracy. She began to write Gone with the Wind in 1926, while recovering from an automobile accident. Her own harshest critic, she would not try to get her work published. She found most of her assignments unfulfilling, and she soon left to try writing fiction more to her own taste. In 1923, she became a feature writer for the Atlanta Journal, and in 1925, she married John Marsh, a public relations officer for Georgia Power. After her mother’s death, Margaret resolved that she had to make a home for her father and brother, so she left college and returned to Atlanta. She attended Smith College but had to come home when her mother fell ill. Her mother instilled in her that education was her only security. She knew those who were relics of a destroyed culture, and those who had put aside gentility for survival. Born in Atlanta in 1900, Margaret Mitchell grew up surrounded by relatives who told endless tales of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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