The last 24 hours have been amazing yet intriguing. I happened to select my first book which I would review and post in my blog. Yet, I was not satisfied. I chose Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. I have read about this book numerous times, which was made so famous in the post depression era of the 1930's. But when I actually sat down to pen my feelings on the book, it was abracadabra. Here was a woman writing about an episode in history close to her heart, namely the American Civil war(1861-1865), with incidents which were actually inspired from her own life(1900-1949). The connection between Scarlett O'Hara and Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell seemed to me very obvious. Maybe I am being unduly critical of her. Authors all around the globe have drawn inspiration from their own personal lives for characters created by them. But a closer look brought forward a different story. Mitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, was born in 1845; she was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, who owned a large plantation on Tara Road in Clayton County, south of Atlanta and who married an American woman named Ellen, and had several children, all daughters, just as the characters created in Gone With the Wind. Rhett Butler is thought to be based on Mitchell's first husband, Red Upshaw, whom she married in 1922, but divorced after it was revealed that he was a bootlegger. In his book, Treasures of the Confederate Coast: The "Real Rhett Butler" and Other Revelations, Dr. E. Lee Spence claims that the historical basis for Margaret Mitchell's romantic sea captain was none other than shipping and banking magnate George Trenholm. Another at least partial character source for Scarlett O'Hara might have been Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, the mother of US president Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt biographer David McCullough discovered that Mitchell, while a reporter for The Atlanta Journal, conducted an interview with one of Martha's closest friends and bridesmaid, Evelyn King Williams, who was 87. In that interview, Martha's physical appearance, beauty, grace, and intelligence were described in great detail. The similarities between Martha, who was also called Mittie, and Scarlett are striking.
I finally bought the book this evening. The charisma of Margaret Mitchell was too much for me to handle. I want to know what did Margaret Mitchell feel when she wrote Gone with the wind with a broken ankle, in a one bedroom apartment on Crescent Avenue she had nicknamed “The Dump.” It is an irony that Mitchell kept her book a secret and only agreed to show the manuscript to Howard Latham of Macmillan Publishing House only because a friend had casually remarked "I wouldn’t take you for the type to write a successful book. You don’t take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.” Stung by the remark, Margaret Mitchell raced home, gathered the scattered piles of manuscript, packed them into a suitcase, and roared back to the Georgian Terrace Hotel, where Latham was staying. She had said to Latham “Take it before I change my mind.” What Latham read was a panoramic novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction centered on a willful young woman named Pansy O’Hara. It had no first chapter – Margaret had written the last chapter first – and Latham decided he did not like the central character’s name. Margaret agreed to change the name to Scarlett. It was the beginning of the most successful novel in history, published on June 30, 1936. I cannot wait to read Gone with the Wind, the only book written by Margaret Mitchell published in her lifetime.
I will be back, once I read Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece.

I know I know..............a lot of people have tried in the past and a lot many will follow in the future. But this blog is not just about books I read, this is only the ramblings of an anonymous reader who happens to like reading, and who dared to imagine that he has a voice which should be heard. I am not a literature student, nor am I an editor of some established newspaper, nor am I a literary agent, nor am I a librarian. I happen to be an average person with a 9 to 5 job who believes in the need to bring some sanity in my insane life, by doing what I like the most..........reading. This is my first attempt at writing and I hope it sends you back to books you read with ecstacy years ago as well as books you have never heard of before.