John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

The South of Gone with the Wind[edit]

While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers.^[37] An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels",^[38] the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's "March and torch" through Georgia.^[39] Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:

She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.^[38]

From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.^[38]

Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:

On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.^[40]

On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro.^[41] Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.^[42]