Books: Backdrop for Atlanta

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GONE WITH THE WIND — Margaret Mitchell—Macmillan ($3).

Unlike other cities of the Old South, Atlanta, Ga. was a modern industrial community from the start. Staked out just one hundred years ago as a railroad terminal, it soon grew until four important lines crossed there. Its commercial activity had few attractions to Southerners who were trained to the slower pace of plantations, while its pushing, aggressive, competitive life made it distasteful to the leisured aristocrats of Savannah or Charleston. But as an island of industrialism in the drowsy sea of Southern society, Atlanta attracted dissatisfied spirits who were fed up with the old order and wanted change even before the Civil War, became a vast manufacturing centre on which the whole South depended when the War finally broke. And when Sherman captured it the Confederacy was lost.

Last week readers had an opportunity to learn about Atlanta's history in an imposing first novel chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club for July. The work of a young Atlanta newspaperwoman, Gone With the Wind is remarkable in other ways than its extreme length. In its 1,037 pages Margaret Mitchell has pictured pre-Civil War plantation life, the disintegration of Southern society during the War, the siege of Atlanta, the chaos of Reconstruction, the emergence of industrialism with its high-pressure rivalries, employment problems, money standards, as the plantation system gave way; the persistence of older traditions within the new order that was growing up. Born in Atlanta, Author Mitchell has lived there all her "thirty-odd" years, been a feature writer on the Atlanta Journal, is the wife of the advertising manager of Georgia Power Co. She worked on Gone With the Wind for seven years. When a publisher's representative cried to see the manuscript she told him that she was merely "playing around with the idea of doing a novel some time or other" and then showed him a first draft of Gone With the Wind that stood almost shoulder-high.