Eighty-five years ago, a young newspaper columnist named Margaret Mitchell, recuperating from an automobile accident, began writing a long novel that she eventually came to call Tomorrow's Another Day. Published 75 years ago, in May 1936, her novel, now called Gone with the Wind, was instantly successful. Even though it bore the high price of $3.00 (the equivalent of almost $49.00 today, the Consumer Price Index tells us) in the depths of the endless Great Depression, it had sold more than a million copies by the end of the year.
In Hollywood, David O. Selznick immediately began working on a film version. It took three years to complete, in part because of some behind-the-scenes difficulties with some of the actors, in part because of the daunting task of translating Mitchell's Civil War-era epic into a movie of reasonable length. On this day in 1939, Selznick premiered the film in Mitchell's native Atlanta; four weeks later, it was released throughout the United States. Like the book, it became an instant hit, and it won the Academy Award for best picture against an exceptionally strong field of competitors.
Mitchell's story, thanks to the classic status of the film, remains well known today. Far less well known is what she did with some of the millions of dollars that she earned from it and her book. Stung by criticism that both were apologies for the Confederacy and slavery, she quietly the tuition for the first several classes of African American doctors to graduate from a night program organized by the faculty of Emory University's medical school. Margaret Mitchell died in another automobile accident in 1949, but that legacy and her creation live on.
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