Margaret Mitchell was a vivacious, somewhat unremarkable Atlanta belle who, but for a leg injury that she sustained at the age of 26 following a traffic accident, might never have written a word outside the feature articles she produced for the Atlanta Journal. One day, partly to please her husband and partly as a cure for her own depression, she sat down at her typewriter and tapped out the words "She had never understood either of the men she loved and so she lost them both." So began the epic saga of Gone With The Wind.
which is, as reconstructed in meticulous detail by Anne Edwards, a sorry tale of chaotic manuscripts and legal wrangling, north/south misunderstandings and phenomenal fame which seems to have brought Mitchell nothing but misery and despair until her death (another traffic accident) in 1949, 13 years after the book's publication. Strange stuff.
