At Margaret Mitchell’s House, ‘Gone With the Wind’ Gets a Rewrite
The handsome Tudor Revival mansion set on a shaded lot in the bustling heart of Atlanta has long been known as the Margaret Mitchell House. Yet, in truth, Mitchell’s time there — a span of seven years, during which she wrote “Gone With the Wind” — was confined to a 650-square-foot first-floor apartment she so lovingly named “The Dump.”
Over time, Mitchell and the property she never owned would become inextricable. Visitors wanted to step into the cramped quarters where Mitchell, an unemployed former newspaper reporter, created a sprawling saga that came to define the antebellum South in the popular imagination.
But Mitchell’s idyllic portrayal of the South — with romance, war, perseverance and a setting swathed in gentility and glamour — was, at best, woefully incomplete. Black characters were reduced to stereotypes and a benevolent gloss coated the brutality of slavery and the institution’s role in bringing about the Civil War.
What was left untold in the 1,037 pages of her book and its 3-hour, 58-minute film adaptation is the focus of a reimagined exhibit at the house turned museum, which reopened to the public on Wednesday after being closed since 2020.
The house where Mitchell lived from 1925 to 1932 offered an ideal venue to untangle the legacy of “Gone With the Wind,” organizers said, by exploring its vast cultural footprint and the reasons it has been a source of both pride and pain.
