MITCHELL, MARGARET. Two typed letters signed ("Margaret Mitchell Marsh") to Martha Angley. Atlanta and Gainesville, Georgia, 6 April and 9 July 1936. Together 2 pages, tall 8vo, the first double-spaced, the second single-spaced and with a two-line autograph postscript, with original envelopes with typed and autograph addresses respectively, both the letters and the envelopes in the following lots). With: (1) A typed letter signed from Dudley Glass, a reporter on the Georgian American, to Martha Angely, Atlanta, 1 April 1936, 1 p., 4to, with envelope, both letter and envelope laminated, directing Miss Angley to Margaret Mitchell: "...I don't know any budding authors, except one. Peggy Mitchell has written a book. A swell book, I understand, and I've forgotten the name of it, though she is a pal of mine and my wife's. Macmillan's is publishing it in may..."; (2)Typescript, carbon copy, of Martha Angley's term paper on Margaret Mitchell, 8 pp., 4to, double-spaced, a bit foxed; (3) Mimeographed article by Hershel Brickell on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, from the New York Post, 27 August 1936, 4pp., 4to; (4) A folder of mostly contemporary news clippings, mainly from Georgia papers, of reviews of Gone With the Wind and articles on Mitchell; (5) Two Copies of The Atlanta Journal Magazine "Margaret Mitchell Memorial Issue" of 18 December 1949, and two other numbers with articles on Mitchell, all worn.

Details

MITCHELL, MARGARET. Two typed letters signed ("Margaret Mitchell Marsh") to Martha Angley. Atlanta and Gainesville, Georgia, 6 April and 9 July 1936. Together 2 pages, tall 8vo, the first double-spaced, the second single-spaced and with a two-line autograph postscript, with original envelopes with typed and autograph addresses respectively, both the letters and the envelopes in the following lots). With: (1) A typed letter signed from Dudley Glass, a reporter on the Georgian American, to Martha Angely, Atlanta, 1 April 1936, 1 p., 4to, with envelope, both letter and envelope laminated, directing Miss Angley to Margaret Mitchell: "...I don't know any budding authors, except one. Peggy Mitchell has written a book. A swell book, I understand, and I've forgotten the name of it, though she is a pal of mine and my wife's. Macmillan's is publishing it in may..."; (2)Typescript, carbon copy, of Martha Angley's term paper on Margaret Mitchell, 8 pp., 4to, double-spaced, a bit foxed; (3) Mimeographed article by Hershel Brickell on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, from the New York Post, 27 August 1936, 4pp., 4to; (4) A folder of mostly contemporary news clippings, mainly from Georgia papers, of reviews of Gone With the Wind and articles on Mitchell; (5) Two Copies of The Atlanta Journal Magazine "Margaret Mitchell Memorial Issue" of 18 December 1949, and two other numbers with articles on Mitchell, all worn.

Provenance

Martha V. Angley Cook; upon her death on 29 May 1993, the letters were inherited by her son Thomas G. Cook.

Lot Essay

Martha V. Angley, the recipient of the eight Margaret Mitchell letters in this and the following six lots, was born in 1916, the daughter of a career army officer; she grew up in College Park, Georgia. In the Spring of 1936, while a student majoring in Southern literature at Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) in Milledgeville, she was assigned to do a term research paper on an up-and-coming Southern writer. She wrote to Dudley Glass, a Georgian American newspaperman, for assistance and he directed her to Margaret Mitchell, who was about to achieve fame with the publication of Gone With the Wind.
In her first letter, dated 6 April 1936, Margaret Mitchell writes: "I was very flattered to get your letter -- and I began to feel like a author. As I will not be published for another month, I haven't felt very much like an author until now...This is just a note to acknowledge your letter...I'm trying to clear up all the million small matters which I have neglected during the last five months when I was correcting typescript and galley proofs. With the pandemonium going on about me at present I dont believe I'd be able to tell you where I was born..."
In her letter of 9 July 1936, Mitchell writes: "...the world has been too much with me, late and soon, recently, events blurring by as fast as telephone poles seen from a train window...thought I'd write you and tell you how much I enjoyed your letter and 'our' term paper. I thought it a grand paper and am very flattered that you picked me to write about. I only wish I'd had something more exciting or some wild eccentricity to make me glamorous and devastating but I haven't. You are awfully sweet to save clippings of me. I've been so rushed I haven't been able to read the reviews yet, with the exception of one or two N.Y. ones. I'm enclosing one now for you...I thought him very kind to me and it made me very happy..."

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