I Don't Give A Damn

Atlanta

I went to visit the former home of Margaret Mitchell today. Up on Peachtree Street at Tenth, it's the place where she wrote "Gone With The Wind" in the late 1920s and early 30s. The building fell into disrepair over the years before Mercedes-Benz bought it in 1994 and spent $5 million restoring it and turning the place into a hospitality centre for the Olympics. Unluckily for them an arsonist started a fire that gutted it just two months before the Games started so they didn't get any of their money back. I imagine they weren't best pleased.

The building's been restored again although there's not much to see inside apart from some fascinating letters sent by Mitchell and her husband around the time of the book's publication in 1936 and after. The novel certainly seemed to start a huge media circus, although given that it still sells a quarter of a million copies a year it's probably not surprising to learn it was stratospherically popular then. Interestingly the couple were lukewarm at best about the film, managing only to say they "liked" it and making various criticisms of how it portrayed the characters. Perhaps it was the huge royalty cheques that persuaded them to keep their mouths shut in public.