Last Friday, Greenwood Library held its Friends of the Library fall event, featuring Ellen F. Brown, a Richmond freelance writer who recently co-authored "Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood," a book that Brown describes as "a biography of the book [‘Gone With the Wind']." Further described as a "must read" by Richmond Times-Dispatch, an "adventure" by Publisher's Weekly and "a fascinating exploration of literature, culture and film" by Midwest Book Review, Brown's work of literature analyzes the ins and outs of the writing processes by Margaret Mitchell through previously unseen documents.
Dean of the Greenwood Library, Suzy Palmer, detailed what The Friends of the Library is, saying, "The Friends of the Library' is a group anyone can join … People who help support the library with their donations and can join for as little as $10 a year, or you can join for considerably more annually and at a certain level. If you're a community member, you get borrowing [and other] privileges … [along with] being able to hear great speakers … and getting to put your support for buying more books for the library."
Palmer described each Friends of the Library event as "partly an entertainment event, part of the way you build interest in the Library in the community … So, it's a way to build a relationship with the community by really making the Library a little bit well known. So, it's the library's part of making Longwood part of our surroundings. And then people come through and are benefited then give back to the library."
Palmer detailed Longwood's luck to be able to host Brown, saying, "Amidst her busy book tour schedule that has included stops at the Margaret Mitchell House at Atlanta, the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, the Biographers International Organization Conference in Washington D.C., the BookExpo America in New York City and an appearance at a CBS Early Show … Ellen very graciously accepted my invitation to speak with us tonight.
Brown, initially not a fan of "Gone With the Wind," became inspired to delve into researching how the famous classic was written after interviewing John Wiley for the magazine, "Fine Books and Collections," on his extensive collection of "Gone with the Wind" memorabilia. After the interview with Wiley, Brown stated, "I like to say that day completely changed my life. I came out of that day meeting with John just completely enthralled with everything ‘Gone with the Wind.'"
Brown described "Gone with the Wind" as "a story of survival amidst occupation," saying that is what causes the novel to be so popular. "Pretty much everyone in the world has had that experience."
Brown described Mitchell's pursuit in writing "Gone with the Wind" in that "she wanted to tell a particular type of story … She wanted to tell the story about the lives of the soldiers left behind and what went on with the people who had to live through this war … and what that meant to the day to day lives of these women and children who dealt with this … She wanted to tell the story about Georgia."
After being published, "Gone with the Wind" won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for a Nobel in literature, as reported by Brown. She said, "It was considered a fine work of American literature."
"To me, part of what's so fascinating about this story is that the book did go on to live this incredible life even after she died," Brown said, noting the book as being the most popular work of American literature on an international scale.
Inspired to write about what went behind the writing of "Gone with the Wind," Brown sought to do something no one had ever done before. "Nobody had ever written a book about the history of the book ‘Gone with the Wind.' There have been Mitchell biographies, but they are all very narrow in scope … There have been many books about the movie ‘Gone with the Wind.'"
The biggest reason why so little information is known about the making of the novel "Gone with the Wind" is due to a lack of access on Mitchell's documents. "To look at them, you have to have one set of permissions. To copy them, you have to have another set of permissions. And God forbid you want to quote from them; — that's a whole other level of territory." Simply going through the documents took Brown one to two years, and without ease.
Brown described the rewards of the process as having "created [a] master chronology … of the life story of ‘Gone With the Wind.'" When discussing what's inside "Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood," Brown said, "It's a lot of excitement and also just drama. All the crazy thing people did because they were fans of Margaret Mitchell."
Be sure to expect the next Friends of the Library event next spring on March 30 with Kelly Cherry, the Commonwealth of Virginia's current Poet Laureate.