John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

An avid reader[edit]

An avid reader, young Margaret read "boys' stories" by G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series by Edward Stratemeyer.^[20] Her mother read Mary Johnston's novels to her before she could read. They both wept reading Johnston's The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912).^[43] Between the "scream of shells, the mighty onrush of charges, the grim and grisly aftermath of war", Cease Firing is a romance novel involving the courtship of a Confederate soldier and a Louisiana plantation belle^[44] with Civil War illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.^[45] Mitchell's two favorite children's books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even as an adult and gave them as gifts.^[18]:32 Another author whom Mitchell read as a teenager and who had a major impact in her understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction was Thomas Dixon.^[46] Dixon's popular trilogy of novels The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907) all depicted in vivid terms a white South victimized during the Reconstruction by Northern carpetbaggers and freed slaves, with an especial emphasis upon Reconstruction as a nightmarish time when black men ran amok, raping white women with impunity.^[46] As a teenager, Mitchell liked Dixon's books so much that she organized the local children to put on dramatizations of his books.^[46] The picture the white supremacist Dixon drew of Reconstruction is now rejected as inaccurate, but at the time, the memory of the past was such it was widely believed by white Americans.^[46] In a letter to Dixon dated August 10, 1936, Mitchell wrote: "I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much."^[46]

Young storyteller[edit]

An imaginative and precocious writer, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks.^{[36]:x, 14–15} Mary Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college.^[18]:32

"Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked.^{[36]:16–17 & 19–33}

Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl.^{[36]:9 & 106–112} The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916,^[47]:7 and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926.^[48]

In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico.^{[36]:185–199} In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book".^[36]:47

School life[edit]