John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Early works[edit]

Lost Laysen[edit]

Mitchell wrote a romance novella, Lost Laysen, when she was fifteen years old (1916). She gave Lost Laysen, which she had written in two notebooks, to a boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. He died in 1945 and the novella remained undiscovered among some letters she had written to him until 1994.^[47]:7–8 The novella was published in 1996, eighty years after it was written, and became a New York Times Best Seller.^[91]

In Lost Laysen, Mitchell explores the dynamics of three male characters and their relationship to the only female character, Courtenay Ross, a strong-willed American missionary to the South Pacific island of Laysen. The narrator of the tale is Billy Duncan, "a rough, hardened soldier of fortune",^[47]:97 who is frequently involved in fights that leave him near death. Courtenay quickly observes Duncan's hard-muscled body as he works shirtless aboard a ship called Caliban. Courtenay's suitor is Douglas Steele, an athletic man who apparently believes Courtenay is helpless without him. He follows Courtenay to Laysen to protect her from perceived foreign savages. The third male character is the rich, powerful yet villainous Juan Mardo. He leers at Courtenay and makes rude comments of a sexual nature, in Japanese nonetheless. Mardo provokes Duncan and Steele, and each feels he must defend Courtenay's honor. Ultimately Courtenay defends her own honor rather than submit to shame.

Mitchell's half-breed^[47]:92 antagonist, Juan Mardo, lurks in the shadows of the story and has no dialogue. The reader learns of Mardo's evil intentions through Duncan:

They were saying that Juan Mardo had his eye on you—and intended to have you—any way he could get you!^[47]:99

Mardo's desires are similar to those of Rhett Butler in his ardent pursuit of Scarlett O'Hara in Mitchell's epic novel, Gone with the Wind. Rhett tells Scarlett:

I always intended having you, one way or another.^[92]

The "other way" is rape. In Lost Laysen the male seducer is replaced with the male rapist.^[93]

The Big Four[edit]

In Mitchell's teenage years, she is known to have written a 400-page novel about girls in a boarding school, The Big Four.^[36]:xxii The novel is thought to be lost; Mitchell destroyed some of her manuscripts herself and others were destroyed after her death.^[51]

Ropa Carmagin[edit]

In the 1920s Mitchell completed a novelette, Ropa Carmagin, about a Southern white girl who loves a biracial man.^[51] Mitchell submitted the manuscript to Macmillan Publishers in 1935 along with her manuscript for Gone with the Wind. The novelette was rejected; Macmillan thought the story was too short for book form.^[94]