Constantin Chatov’s portrait of literary great Margaret Mitchell captures authors steady intelligence

Art : What Lies Beneath

Portrait of Margaret Mitchell by Constantin Chatov

Niall MacMonagle

Margaret ­Mitchell, born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900, published the 1000-page Gone with the Wind on this day in 1936. An instant ­­best-seller, it sold 50,000 copies on one day alone, and by Christmas, one million. It won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer, and by the time Mitchell died in 1941, eight million copies had been sold in 40 countries.

Set in Atlanta, during and after the American Civil War, the novel tells of the defeat of the South. Mitchell, whose mother was an Irish Catholic, created an Irish-American protagonist in Scarlett O’Hara, originally named Pansy O’Hara, and Mitchell knew her subject matter. Her great-great-great grandfather had fought in the American Revolution (1775-1783) and her grandfather fought in the Civil War (1861-1865).