Finding the truth in Gone with the Wind!

That’s right YOU can learn just as much about Gone with the Wind as the next person if you set yourself to the task. I did not begin my career collecting plates, going to all the GWTW presentations, screenings and speeches (and I still don’t….not that there is anything wrong with that)…I simply went ot a library (where you can read the books for free) and started my search.

I have heard from many over the last few years that do not believe that Tara from Hollywood still exists (it does) and their disbelief is rooted in their ignorance of Tara’s history and travels. I have heard from others (or been notified by those in attendance) that there are those who claim that there is no truth in the tales that Margaret Mitchell used to fill the pages of her book (and thus fill the scenes in the subsequent movie) but they are wrong and once again it is in the lack of study, the scholarship of the lazy.

Well rather than “curse the darkness” (of ignorance), I will, “light a candle” (of education) and share a few sources that I hope you will take advantage of. There is no need to spend the money to purchase any of these books if you do not desire to own them, they are all readily available in the local library. May I suggest you start by reading Gone with the Wind since it will be hard to look for connections and truth in something you have not read. Then I would proceed to Harwell’s book, Letters from Margaret Mitchell 1936-1949. In that book Mitchell states in a letter in 1936 that, “practically all of the incidences in GWTW are true”. That is the one statement that changed my research from looking for a few coincidences to finding the truth of her statement,…and I did (find the truth). I would next suggest you take a look at the History of Clayton County Georgia which has a great section on Phillip Fitzgerald, the patriarch of Mitchell’s mother’s side of the family and no doubt the model for Gerald O’Hara. I would then suggest you pick up David O’Connell’s book, The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell’s, Gone with the Wind.

By the time you finish those books you will be convinced that Gone with the Wind was not just some dream sequence brought on by a stomach ache from too much banana pudding from Pitty Pat’s Porch (a famous Atlanta Restaurant). You’ll understand the statement that, “life imitates art” and (hopefully) you will then purchase a copy of my book, Lost In Yesterday and see how the stories fall into place (and that even the Mitchell family agreed with my research). There are many more books to read but I ill you start with those to get the flavor of the truth of it all before continuing with the many others who add another “brick in the wall” of my argument.

I’ll see yáll up at the gate.

Peter