SOUTHERN DAUGHTER

The Life of Margaret Mitchell and the Making of Gone With the Wind
Darden Asbury Pyron | Author

• $17.95 hardcover
• 560 pages | 35 b&w photos
• 1-58818-097-2
• Biography

the book

This definitive biography of the author of Gone With the Wind offers a perceptive psychological analysis of the novel and a concise study of the book's shifting critical fortunes in the contemporary South. The life of "Peggy" Mitchell, from her birth in the highest reaches of aristocratic Atlanta in 1900 to her death in 1949 in a car accident, is detailed in a matter that is sympathetic yet wholly objective. A fascinating mass of contradictions, Mitchell emerges here as alternately retiring and flirty, as a Southern belle confident enough to enter Atlanta's worst prisons and slums during her journalism career at the Atlanta Journal, and as an intensely private person who nonetheless answered every fan letter herself. the breadth of this biography is vast, ranging from the intimate--including the astonishing real-life model for Rhett Butler--to the global--exploring the intense responses to the book from people all over the world who continue to see an image of their own political struggles in Mitchell's depiction of bravery in defense of a lost cause.

the author

Darden Asbury Pyron is a professor of history at Florida International University in Miami. He is the author of Liberace:An American Boy and Recasting: Gone With the Wind in American Culture. He lives in Miami, Florida

the praise

"Fascinating...thorough and balanced"--The New York Times

"Incredibly detailed...should satisfy not only every legitimate scholarly interrest but even the nearly insatiable curiosity of Mitchell's most important fans"--Choice