Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel engages leading historians, biographers and personal friends to reveal a complex woman who experienced profound identity shifts during her life and struggled with the two great issues of her day: the changing role of women and the liberation of African Americans. A charismatic force until a tragic accident lead to her death at age 48, Mitchell rebelled against the stifling social restrictions placed on women: as an unconventional tomboy, a defiant debutante, a brazen flapper, one of Georgia’s first female newspaper reporters, and, later, as a philanthropist who risked her life to fund African American education. Emmy®-winning executive producer/writer Pamela Roberts uses reenactments based on Mitchell’s personal letters and journals to show how her upbringing and romantic relationships influenced the creation of Gone With the Wind. The film also explores Scarlett and Rhett’s place as two of the world’s greatest lovers and the public’s initial reception to the book and David O. Selznick’s 1939 epic film – from racial lightning rod to model for survival. 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize win for the only book published during her lifetime and Gone With the Wind’s lasting popularity seems permanently etched in the American cultural landscape.

“Red” Upshaw (pictured fifth from left) and Margaret Mitchell’s (pictured sixth from left) wedding photo, September 2, 1922. Upshaw is believed to be the model for the Rhett Butler character in Gone With the Wind. Best man John Marsh (pictured second from left) would become Mitchell’s second husband, July 4, 1925, and her editor when writing Gone With the Wind. Also pictured, Mitchell’s older brother Stephens (far right). Courtesy of Atlanta History Center.

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta. Her great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Mitchell fought in the American Revolution (1775-83), and his son William Mitchell took part in the War of 1812. Her great-grandfather Isaac Green Mitchell was a circuit-riding Methodist minister who settled in Marthasville, which later was named Atlanta. Mitchell was thus a fourth-generation Atlantan. Her grandfather Russell Mitchell fought in the Civil War and suffered two bullet wounds to the head during the fighting at Antietam. Twice married, he had twelve children, the oldest of whom was Mitchell’s father, Eugene.

Mitchell’s mother’s family was Irish Catholic. Her great-grandfather Phillip Fitzgerald came to America from Ireland and eventually settled on a plantation near Jonesboro in Fayette County. (This portion of the county now lies in Clayton County.) The Fitzgeralds had seven daughters. Annie Fitzgerald, Mitchell’s grandmother, married John Stephens, who had emigrated from Ireland and settled in Atlanta. Stephens amassed large real-estate properties and helped found a trolley-car system in the city. The Stephenses had twelve children; Mary Isobel (May Belle), Mitchell’s mother, was the seventh. May Belle married Eugene Muse Mitchell on November 8, 1892. Eugene was a noted Atlanta attorney, and May Belle was a staunch supporter of woman suffrage. They had a son, Stephens, followed four years later by a daughter, Margaret Munnerlyn.

Mitchell began making up stories before she could write, dictating them to her mother. Later she made her own books with cardboard covers and filled them with adventure stories using her friends, relatives, and herself as characters. As she grew older she switched to copybooks, which her mother stored in inexpensive enamel bread boxes. A few of the hundreds of tales that she wrote have survived, including two Civil War tales. When the family moved to Peachtree Street, the young Mitchell attended the Tenth Street School and later Woodberry School, a private school. She branched out to writing, directing, and starring in plays, coercing the neighborhood children to take part.

From 1914 to 1918 Mitchell attended the Washington Seminary, a prestigious Atlanta finishing school, where she was a founding member and officer of the drama club. She was also the literary editor of Facts and Fancies, the high school yearbook, in which two of her stories were featured. She was president of the Washington Literary Society.

When America entered World War I (1917-18), the seminary girls were in demand at dances for the young servicemen stationed at Camp Gordon and Fort McPherson. At one such dance in the summer of 1918 Mitchell met twenty-two-year-old Clifford Henry, a wealthy and socially prominent New Yorker who was a bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon. The two fell in love and became engaged shortly before he was shipped overseas. He was killed in October 1918 while fighting in France.

In September 1918 Mitchell entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she began using the nickname “Peggy.” Her freshman year at college was disrupted when an influenza epidemic forced the cancellation of classes. In January her mother contracted influenza and died the day before her daughter reached home. Mitchell completed her freshman year at Smith, then returned to Atlanta to take her place as mistress of the household and to enter the upcoming debutante season. During the last charity ball of the season, Mitchell created a scandal by performing a sensuous dance popular in the nightclubs of Paris, France.

Soon Mitchell met Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, who was from a prominent Raleigh, North Carolina, family. They were wed in 1922, but the marriage was brief. After four months Upshaw left Atlanta for the Midwest and never returned. The marriage was annulled two years later.

In the same year that she married, Mitchell landed a job with the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She used “Peggy Mitchell” as her byline. Her interviews, profiles, and sketches of life in Georgia were well received. During her four years with the Sunday Magazine, Mitchell wrote 129 articles, worked as a proofreader, substituted for the advice columnist, reviewed books, and occasionally did hard news stories for the paper. Complications from a broken ankle led her to end her career as a journalist.

Mitchell’s second marriage was to John Robert Marsh on July 4, 1925, and the couple set up housekeeping in a small apartment affectionately called “the Dump.” They entertained the newspaper crowd and other friends on a regular basis. Marsh, originally from Maysville, Kentucky, worked for the Georgia Railway and Power Company (later Georgia Power Company) as director of the publicity department.

In 1926, to relieve the boredom of being cooped up with a broken ankle, Mitchell began to write Gone With the Wind. Setting up her Remington typewriter on an old sewing table, she completed the majority of the book in three years. She wrote the last chapter first and the other chapters in no particular order. Stuffing the chapters into manila envelopes, she eventually accumulated almost seventy chapters. When visitors appeared, she covered her work with a towel, keeping her novel a secret. There has been much speculation on whether the characters were based on real people, but Mitchell claimed they were her own creations.

In April 1935 Harold Latham, an editor for the Macmillan publishing company in New York City, toured the South looking for new manuscripts. Latham heard that Mitchell had been working on a manuscript and asked her if he could see it, but she denied having one. When a friend commented that Mitchell was not serious enough to write a novel, Mitchell gathered up many of the envelopes and took them to Latham at his hotel. He had to purchase a suitcase to carry them. He read part of the manuscript on the train to New Orleans, Louisiana, and sent it straight to New York. By July Macmillan had offered her a contract. She received a $500 advance and 10 percent of the royalties.

As she revised the manuscript, Mitchell cut and rearranged chapters, confirmed details, wrote the first chapter, changed the name of the main character (originally called Pansy), and struggled to think of a title that suited her. Titles considered included Tomorrow Is Another Day, Another Day, Tote the Weary Load, Milestones, Ba! Ba! Blacksheep, Not in Our Stars, and Bugles Sang True. Finally she settled on a phrase from a favorite poem “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, / Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng.” Published in 1936, Gone With the Wind was 1,037 pages long and sold for three dollars.

Gone With the Wind was a phenomenal success and received rave reviews. Overnight, Mitchell became a celebrity and remained very much in the public spotlight through the production and premiere of the film based on her novel in 1939. She was in constant demand for speaking engagements and interviews. At first she complied, but later, pleading poor health, she usually declined these requests and stopped autographing copies of her book. She said she wanted to remain simply Mrs. John Marsh.

Gone With the Wind was Mitchell’s only published novel. At her request, the original manuscript (except for a few pages retained to validate her authorship) and all other writings were destroyed. These included a novella in the Gothic style, a ghost story set in an old plantation home left vacant after the Civil War. According to the recollections of Lois Cole, a friend of Mitchell’s and a Macmillan employee, three people had read this tale (written before Gone With the Wind)  and thought it was worth publishing by one of the bigger publishing houses. Cole suggested that Mitchell enter it in the Little, Brown novelette contest.

Possibly one of the reasons that Mitchell never wrote another novel was that she spent so much time working with her brother and her husband to protect the copyright of her book abroad. Up until the publication of Gone With the Wind, international copyright laws were ambiguous and varied from country to country. Correspondence also took much of her time. During the years following publication, she personally answered every letter she received about her book. With the outbreak of World War II (1941-45), she worked tirelessly for the American Red Cross, even outfitting a hospital ship. She also set up scholarships for black medical students.

August 11, 1949, Mitchell and her husband decided to go to a movie, A Canterbury Tale, at the Peachtree Art Theatre. Just as they started to cross Peachtree Street, near 13th Street, a speeding taxi crested the hill. Mitchell stepped back; Marsh stepped forward. The driver applied the brakes, skidded, and hit Mitchell. She was rushed to Grady Hospital but never regained consciousness. During the five days before she died, crowds waited outside for news. U.S. president Harry Truman, Georgia governor Herman Talmadge, and Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield all asked to be kept informed of her condition. Special phone lines were installed at Grady Hospital, and friends manned the lines in four-hour shifts. Mitchell died on August 16, 1949, and was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.

Mitchell was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement in 1994 and into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.

Margaret Mitchell

The following interview with Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind was conducted by Mrs. Medora Perkerson, of The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, broadcast over radio station WSB, Atlanta, Georgia., July 3, 1936, on The Atlanta Journal. This is the first time this interview has been published in a digital format.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, I have read your book Gone With the Wind with a great 
deal of pleasure, but I know that many of our listeners are not familiar with it. So can you tell us, briefly, just what the book is about?

MISS MITCHELL: I am glad to tell you, Medora. My novel is the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time.

MRS. PERKERSON: Many critics are saying that your book sums up the whole story of the South and what the war and Reconstruction did to the South and to Southern people. The title of your book, Gone With the Wind means that the ante-bellum civilization was swept away by the tornado of war, doesn’t it?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, Medora, that is the meaning of the title, naturally I would be glad if people thought that the book did tell the story of the whole South. But that isn’t the kind of book I tried to write. It is a book about 
Georgia and Georgia people, — especially North Georgia people. There are incidents in the book which take place in Savannah, Charleston, Macon and New Orleans, but nearly all of the action takes place in Atlanta and at Tara, the plantation home of Scarlett O’Hara, the heroine. Tara was in Clayton County, near Jonesboro, Ga. The story begins on the plantation in the period when the old style Southern life was at its height. Then the war comes, and Scarlett O’Hara goes to Atlanta to live. Thereafter, she experiences what Atlanta experienced during the war years — the thrills and excitement of the boom town that Atlanta became when the war changed it from an obscure small town into one of the most important cities in the South, then the increasing hardships as the Confederate cause waned, then the alarm of Atlanta people as they saw General Sherman’s army advancing steadily on the town, and ‘finally the terrifying days of the siege, the capture of Atlanta by Sherman and the burning of the town. Scarlett O’Hara goes through all those experiences and, after the war is over, she comes back to Atlanta and does her part in the rebuilding of the city. She lives through the terrible days of Reconstruction and the story carries her, and Atlanta, up to the time when the Carpetbaggers had been run out of Georgia and people could bean living their normal lives again.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, how did you happen to know so much about the wartime activities of Atlanta?

MISS MITCHELL: My brother, Stephens Mitchell, had written an excellent Article in the Atlanta Historical Bulletin on the war-time industries of  Atlanta. I used much of his material. I also used facts I myself dug out of old newspapers of the war days and old diaries and letters of the period. I was surprised and thrilled to see how vital a part Atlanta played during the war, how important Atlanta was to the Confederacy. Atlanta wasn’t a big town in 1861. The population was only twelve thousand. But the little town had four railroads and they crossed here. And so Atlanta could draw supplies from the deep South to send to the armies at the front. The railroads connected Atlanta with the ports of Savannah, Charleston and Wilmington. The four railroads of Atlanta could feed the armies in Virginia and in Tennessee, Due to its safe position behind the lines. Atlanta was excellently suited for base hospital purposes and it had dozens of hospitals. In fact, eighty thousand sick and wounded passed through the Atlanta hospitals during the war. Overnight, there sprung up in Atlanta all kinds of war industries, for the South had to manufacture most of her war materials. There were pistol factories and percussion cap factories, tanneries and boot makers, saddle and harness factories. There were machine manufacturing shops and there were iron rolling mills where the armor plate for war ships was turned out, as well as the iron rails for the rail-road tracks. There were wagon shops and hat and cap factories and every type of industry needed to support an army in the field. Little Atlanta was terribly 
important to the Confederacy.

MRS. PERKERSON: General Sherman seemed to realize that, didn’t he?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, Sherman knew that he had to take Atlanta. If he hadn’t succeeded, Grant could never have defeated General Lee in Virginia. For as long as Atlanta was drawing supplies from the deep South and sending them to Virginia, General Lee’s army could still stay in the field. As I road all these facts about the importance of Atlanta I wondered why they had never figured in fiction. And I wondered why the fighting around Atlanta was almost entirely omitted from novels. So much has been written, in fiction, about the campaigns in Virginia, so little about the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta. And that campaign between General Sherman and General Johnston has always held more drama for me than any of the campaigns in Virginia, for General Johnston was far outnumbered from the start but he fought almost every day for months, slowly being driven back toward Atlanta but handling the retreat in a masterly way. I always thought it a truly heroic campaign and so I wrote about it.

MRS. PERKERSON: Did you get all of your information about the Sixties and the Seventies from research? How did it happen that you, a very modern person, knew this era so well?

MISS MITCHELL: Medora, I can answer that question best by saying that I grew up at a time when children were seen and not heard. That means that when I was a child I had to hear a lot about the Civil war on Sunday afternoons when I was dragged hither and yon to call on elderly relatives and friends of the family who had fought in the war or lived behind the lines. When I was a little girl, children were not encouraged to express their personalities by running and screaming on Sunday afternoons. When we went calling, I was usually scooped up onto a lap, told that I didn’t look like a soul on either side of the family and then forgotten for the rust of the afternoon while the gathering spiritedly refought the Civil war. I sat on bony knees, fat, slick taffeta laps and soft, flowered muslin laps. I did not even dare wriggle for fear of getting the flat side of a hair brush where it would do the most good. I should add, while I’m talking about knees and laps, that cavalry knees were the worst knees of all. Cavalry knees had the tendency to 
trot and bounce and jog in the midst of reminiscences and this kept me from going to sleep,

MRS. PERKERSON: It was lucky for your book that those cavalry knees did keep you awake, wasn’t it? Otherwise you’d have missed a lot of material you used in your book, wouldn’t you?

MISS  MITCHELL: Yes, fortunately for Gone With the Wind I had to stay awake. So I heard about fighting and wounds and the primitive way they were treated, how ladies nursed in hospitals, the way gangrene smelled, what substitutes were used for drugs and food and clothing when the blockade got too tight for these necessities to be brought in from abroad. I heard about the burning and looting of Atlanta and the way the refugees from the town crowded the roads and trains to Macon, and I heard about Reconstruction, too. In fact, I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn’t believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions.

MRS. PERKERSON: I don’t suppose children growing up now will ever get as excited about the Last Cause as we did who listened to grandmothers and grandfathers tell about firsthand experiences.

MISS MITCHELL: No, and I think they are missing a lot. I am glad that I grew up at a time when there were plenty of old veterans in Atlanta. Certainly I could never have written my book without my memories of those old men, when I was a little girl and rode my pony every afternoon, my boon companion was a fine old Confederate veteran. He looked exactly like a stage Confederate — white hair and goatee, jimswinger coat, and a habit of gallantly kissing, ladies’ hands, even my own grubby six-year-old hand. He and a young lady who had reached the beau age were the only two people in my part of town who owned horses. And we three went riding together. Atlanta wasn’t so big then and it didn’t take long to reach dirt roads and the country. We never went riding in the country that we didn’t pick up some other old veteran to ride with us: Frequently we had several veterans with us. The families of the veterans and my mother encouraged us to ride together in the belief that we’d keep each other out of mischief.

MRS. PERKERSON: And did you?

MISS  MITCHELL: No, Medora. I regret to say that we didn’t. There was still plenty of fire and dash left in the old boys. They still had hot tempers and bullheads and they still dearly loved a fight. The day seldom passed that they didn’t have a heated argument about the Civil War. And the day seldom passed when the young lady who accompanied us didn’t turn her horse and race for home. She realized, oven if I didn’t, that the company of quarrelsome old gentlemen was no place for a lady.

MRS. PERKERSON: I’ll bet you didn’t go home.

MISS MITCHELL: No, I didn’t, for at the age of six I was not concerned about being a lady. Besides I was too fascinated by the way the veterans shouted at each other. On these occasions, too, I was seen and not heard. I couldn’t have been heard, even if I had wanted to speak, for it would of taken the lungs of the bull of Bashan to be heard above their tumult.

MRS. PERKERSON: What did they quarrel about?

MISS MITCHELL: Oh, every subject under the sun, especially the particular regiments to which they had belonged in the Confederate army. Each one bragged about his own regiment and low-rated all the others. For instance, I recall one time when we flushed an old gentlemen who had been with Wheeler’s cavalry. He was a tough, wiry, little old fellow. And another veteran who had been in Stuart’s Cavalry remarked that the boys in Wheeler’s cavalry were worse chicken thieves than Sherman’s men ever were. Of course, after that insult, they went at each other at the top of their voices and with their riding crops. The language they used was highly entertaining and very instructive to a small but interested girl. They talked about the Civil war all the time, refought old campaigns and argued about the tangled, bewildering muddle of politics of the Reconstruction days. Their remarks about the carpet baggers and scallawags of reconstruction days were also forceful and of deep interest to me. The young lady who went riding with us always turned her horse toward home why they got on the subject of Reconstruction, so how could I help knowing about the Civil war and the hard times that came after it! I was raided on it; I thought it had all happened just a few years before I was born.

MRS. PERKERSON: Perhaps that is why you made it so real in Gone With the Wind. And I think the thing we are all most proud of is that you have given the complete picture, not just one side of the old South and war and Reconstruction. It is all there in your book and it all comes alive. A lot of people are already saying that you must have taken some of the characters from real life. One of your characters, Aunt Pittypat is exactly like one of my relatives, and I’ll bet Charleston is going to rise up in a body and denounce the dashing Captain Rhett Butler of your book, not only because of his refusing to go into the Confederate army but for what he said about making money out of the wrecking 
of the Confederacy. Did you take any of your characters from real life?

MISS MITCHELL: No, not a single character was taken from real life. In the first place, I wouldn’t know how to go about taking a character from life, and in the second place, made-up characters are so easy to handle. They will obey the author and do just what the author wants, whereas characters taken from real people are apt to be obstinate and unmanageable and to insist on having their own way.

MRS. PERKERSON: Your heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is not at all like the usual Civil war heroine. She was just as shocking in her era as the flapper was in the jazz age. Was it your idea that Scarlett was the product of her time, just as the flapper was the product of the period following the World War?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, wars have a way of changing women, whether the women are dressed in hoopskirts and pantalets or in knee-length skirts and bobbed hair. The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things.

MRS. PERKERSON: They say that a good woman has no history, or, at least, no one is interested in her history. But in your book, Gone With the Wind, I found Melanie Wilkes, your other heroine, who was a sweet, gentle character, almost as interesting as Scarlett. Melanie and Scarlett went through the war and Reconstruction, side by side, and it was fascinating to see how the same set of circumstances produced such contrasts in character. The experiences that hardened Scarlett O’Hara and made her unscrupulous simply made Melanie Wilkes more of a lady, she could do anything she wanted to do, and not shock people as Scarlett did, simply because Melanie remained a lady… that seemed to me to be the real theme of the book, how different characters reacted under the stress of circumstances.

MISS MITCHELL: If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose is the theme of survival. What quality is it that makes some people able to survive catastrophes and others, apparently just as brave and able and strong, go under? I have always been interested in this particular quality in people. We’ve all seen the same thing happen in the present depression. It happens in every social upheaval, in wars, in panics, in revolutions. It’s happened all the way down history from the time the barbarians sacked ancient Rome, And before that, I suppose, some people survive disasters. Others do not. What qualities are in those people who fight their way through triumphantly — that are lacking in those who do go under? What was it that made our Southern people able to come through a war, a Reconstruction and the complete wrecking of all our social and economic 
systems? I don’t know. I only know that the survivors of the Civil war used to call that quality “gumption.”

MRS. PERKERSON: Another thing that seemed to interest everyone I talked to about this book is the reality given by small details. Take the night Scarlett O’Hara went to Melanie’s party, just after she had been discovered in a compromising situation with Melanie’s husband. You had Scarlett wear a jade green watered silk dress with a large bustle adorned with pink velvet roses. It wouldn’t have done to describe this dress so minutely if ladies hadn’t worn rose covered bustles at that particular time, would it?

MISS MITCHELL: Indeed it wouldn’t! The bustle came into style in 1868, replacing the wide hoop skirts of the war days. If I hadn’t gotten the date of the bustle correctly, lots of old ladies would have written me indignantly — saying that they never wore rose covered bustles at that time. I had to do a lot of work on such small details as this — because I was very anxious to have Gone With the Wind accurate — not only in large historical facts but in the very smallest ones too.

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, where did you find out all the thousands of small details?

MISS MITCHELL: I read the files of old newspapers from 1860 to1878 and I read hundreds of old magazines, diaries and letters. And I don’t know how many hundreds of books I consulted. Those books were on every subject from Mid-Victorian architecture to how far a Confederate rifle would shoot. But best of all sources of information were my father and my late mother. Although both my father and my mother were born long after Reconstruction days — they know as much about those troublous times as though they had lived through them themselves, When they were children, they too had listened to the stories of the old folks and they remembered those stories and retold them to me. I think my father knows everything in the world about the Civil war, especially that part of the war which was fought in Georgia. I believe he knows where every battery was placed in the Atlanta campaign, the exact name of the officer commanding it, what the officer’s mother’s mother’s maiden name was, and whether the officer was shot in the right leg or the left. My mother knew just as much as he did. What was even better, she knew about the social history of the sixties and the manner, of that day. She had kept her ears open when she was a little girl and she could tell me, for instance, what was considered genteel during the Civil war and what was considered fast. She knew what our grandmothers ate and how they dressed and what songs they sang and how long a young man must know a girl before he started calling her by her first name — with “Miss” preceding it, of course.

MRS. PERKERSON: Thank you, Peggy, for telling me about the background of Gone With the Wind, I hope everyone has enjoyed it as much as I have.

Wally Lamb: I think for a lot of kids it’s the voice of Scout, it’s certainly not the adult voice of Jean Louise Finch, it’s Scout’s voice. I think the fact that she is a tomboy helps the boys. And I think a lot of the guys, as I recall, liked Jem too. You know, he sort of spoke their kind of language, and a lot of them had annoying little sisters, so that sort of invited them along for the ride as well.

Also, this was, this was in the seventies when I started teaching. And, you know, there was a lot of racial turmoil in the country. And I think that book, because the characters are, become sort of personally applicable, I think a story can go a lot farther lots of times than a headline can or, something on the 6:30 news. So the kids, I think it became a sort of a vehicle by which they could begin to think and sort of process some of these emotional reactions that they were having.

I know one of the things that happened at our high school during that early era when I was teaching was that, the African American kids were demanding a black history course. And the school was not providing one, and so the kids staged a demonstration out of the green near the school. And you know, I was thinking about this just today, that I think in it’s own way, To Kill a Mockingbird, sort of, and I don’t mean to overstate this, but I think To Kill a Mockingbird sort of triggers the beginning of change and certainly puts onto the stage the questions of racial equality and bigotry in a way that I think, a century earlier, Harriet Beecher Stower’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sort of stirred things up and got people riled up enough and motivated to maybe, to maybe change things.

And then this, of course, the inevitable exploitation of a book that a means so much to so many people. I know a little bit about Harriet Beecher Stowe because she lived close by, in Hartford. And I know that she was sort of appalled by some of these really cheesy stage productions that started traveling the country. And I saw at one point, maybe 3 or 4 years ago up in Montpellier, VT, a staged version of To Kill a Mockingbird. And it was, it was okay, it was, I wouldn’t say it was cheesy. But it wasn’t experience, it couldn’t even approach that same kind of experience that reading the book is.

Richard Russo: You know the first time I read To Kill a Mocking Bird I don’t think I finished it and the reason I didn’t finish it was that– at the time– at that time I would have been in high school.  And at that time I had what was a hard and fast rule, which was to read everything I could get my hands on except what was assigned to me.  It was Catholic school and I just– I just– I was in that rebellious frame of mind that if somebody else wanted me to read it, it was probably for [censored].

And so I– I went into– I went to– To Kill a Mocking Bird with– with that notion, that– that it was like the other books that the nuns wanted me to read.  And so I– I– I read– I– I remember reading, of course, I’m thinking– reluctant– reluctantly, you know, thinking this is a– this is really good, but I couldn’t admit to it; I couldn’t admit it to them, I couldn’t admit– admit it to myself.

But there was that– that father/daughter relationship– burrowed, I think, under my skin even then.  We all– those of us who become writers– are becoming writers long before we ever put pen to paper.  In the same way that the– my first reading of Great Expectations which I didn’t finish either because it too had been assigned.  But there was something about the opening scenes of that book where– where– where Pip and Magwitch come together, there was something that burrowed into me there, a way in which you can be and– you can be ashamed of someone you love,

Yeah, yeah– that– that relationship between Joe Gargery and– and– and Pip– really burrowed underneath ‘cause I had a– I had a father who was– who was largely absent and– and– and when he came back, it was a very– it was a small town and everybody wanted to know why my father didn’t live with us and so there was something about the opening of– of Great Expectations that burrowed very, very deep.

And To Kill a Mocking Bird was that way.  Even though I didn’t finish the book, even– even though I was– I was stubbornly a teenager and– and– but– and in some way it probably frightened me– something– something about that book frightened me.  But– I look back on it now in the way in which you are becoming a writer– and certain books influence you, it’s hard to imagine Empire Falls being written without To Kill a Mocking Bird because I don’t think Tick could have existed– without Scout.

And something about that– that father/daughter relationship– when I came back to it as an adult– a lot of– a lot of the way I– I felt about my daughters and the way in which they were– they were going about in the world, the way Scout does– Scout loves her father but the truth is young people are to a certain extent on their own and– and they’re– and they’re– they’re learning about life through their own– through their own eyes and through own experiences.

James McBride: Well, I mean, as a professional writer, the character…the whole business of character description and character construction in To Kill a Mockingbird is really the ceiling against which great character writing will forever bump in a lot of ways, because the characters are so strong and so definitive, yet they have a great deal of ambiguity, and they have a great deal of innocence and then soiled innocence, and they have a great deal of obvious death and they are swept by the events of their time.

She certainly set the standard in terms of how some of these issues need to be discussed but in many ways I feel the bar’s been lowered…I think the moral bar’s been in terms of that. And that, that is really distressing. I mean, we need a thousand Atticus Finchs.

And also as an adult, you know, it occurs to me that the black characters in the book, heroic as they are, they don’t survive. The violence that…the societal violence that takes place to, I think his name is Tom…Tom Robinson. You know, the violence, the abject societal behavior towards Tom Robinson affects his family for generations, at least fictionally. And in real life, you know, my wife’s great-grandfather was shot while he was standing in line to get feed because a white guy just told him to move and he wouldn’t move. And that murder just goes on and on, it’s told to generations of people in my wife’s family. And similarly in Harper Lee’s book, that part of the story was something that for me has never been quite resolved in the manner that I would liked to have seen it resolved, partially because that wasn’t her purpose to tell Tom Robinson’s story, but that’s partially my purpose, as a writer.

I think the challenge that she laid out for us, for us the writers who follow in her wake, is to make sure that the various dimensions of these stories are told properly, and that we stand up in own time to talk about issues that count now. It’s easy to poke fun and say, ‘I would of done this and what a brave women she was,’ and so on and so forth, but when it counted, Harper Lee did what was necessary. And how many of us now are doing what’s necessary…in terms of standing up for the good and for the just?

I mean, look, I wish I’d written the book so, let that be said. I’m not criticizing her work, she’s a great writer, she’s an American treasure there’s no question about it. But just like anything else, when the imprint of racism lays its hand on you, you have to be conscious as to how that affects you and your work. I think she did the best she could given how she was raised. That still doesn’t absolve the book or this country of the whole business of racism.

More than 50 years after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide, still sells nearly one million copies each year and is required reading in most American classrooms, making it quite possibly the most influential American novel of the 20th century. The 1962 film version, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, won a trio of Academy Awards.

Harper Lee: Hey, Boo chronicles how this beloved novel came to be written, provides the context and history of the Deep South where it is set, and documents the many ways the novel has changed minds and shaped history. For teachers, students or fans of the classic, Hey, Boo enhances the experience of reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Containing never-before-seen photos and letters, Hey, Boo features insightful interviews with friends and an exclusive interview with Lee’s sister, Alice Finch Lee (age 99 at filming), who share intimate recollections, anecdotes and biographical details for the first time, offering new insight into the life and mind of Harper Lee, including why she never published again. Oprah Winfrey; Tom Brokaw; Pulitzer Prize-winners Rick Bragg, Anna Quindlen, Richard Russo, Jon Meacham, and Diane McWhorter; and civil rights leader Andrew Young address the novel’s power, influence, and popularity, and the many ways it has shaped their lives.

Interviewees (in alphabetical order):

Mary Badham – actress, played Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Boaty Boatwright – casting director, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Rick Bragg – author
Tom Brokaw – news anchor, journalist and author
Joy Brown – Lee’s friend
Michael Brown – Lee’s friend
Reverend Thomas Lane Butts – Pastor Emeritus of Lee’s church
Rosanne Cash – musician and author
Mark Childress – author
Jane Ellen Clark – former director, The Monroe County Heritage Museum
Allan Gurganus – author
David Kipen – former director of literature, National Endowment for the Arts
Wally Lamb – author
Alice Finch Lee – Lee’s sister
James McBride – author and musician
Diane McWhorter – historian
Jon Meacham – historian
James Patterson – author
Anna Quindlen – author
Richard Russo – author
Lizzie Skurnick – author
Lee Smith – author
Adriana Trigiani – author
Mary Tucker – educator and Monroeville, Alabama resident
Scott Turow – author
Oprah Winfrey – TV and film producer, founder of O, The Oprah magazine, radio programmer, actress, philanthropist, and chairman of Harpo Inc.
Andrew Young – civil rights leader

Harper Lee: Hey, Boo is a production of Mary Murphy & Company, LLC. Mary McDonagh Murphy is producer, writer and director. Rich White is director of photography. Christopher Seward is editor and producer. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, Vital Projects Fund, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers.