The Burnings of Atlanta
While writing about the burning of Atlanta in my blog on Gone with the Wind’s 75th birthday, as an ex-Atlantan, I remembered that the city had been plagued by other fires. Aside from the 1864 blaze set by the Confederates, followed by General Sherman’s notorious conflagration consuming a third of the city, there was also the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. It arose from four separate, relatively insignificant blazes one quiet May morning and quickly spread the fire department’s resources dangerously thin. Morphing into one enormous incendiary beast, it required the assistance of firefighters from as far away as Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee, to bring it under control. After raging for eleven hours, it consumed 22 million gallons of water and destroyed almost...
Read MoreOne-Man Show
Seventy-five years ago today, the film version of Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta. It remains one of the most beloved classics in American cinema and holds the number six spot on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of 100 Greatest American Films. Cast, crew and history concur that the daunting task of transforming book-to-film would have been impossible without the passion and drive of one man, producer David O. Selznick. Flying in the face of naysayers insisting costume epics were passé and that civil war movies always lost money, Selznick Studios paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell’s phenomenally successful bestseller only a month after publication. The book, not incidentally, was first entitled Tomorrow Is Another Day and had a...
Read MoreGeorgia on My Mind
I first read Gone with the Wind when I was sixteen and have reread it twice as an adult. I was totally captivated that first time, but later on I agreed with Margaret Mitchell that she was (I’m paraphrasing here) “no great author.” She did, however, have incomparable skills as a storyteller, an opinion shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald who said he lost the 1937 Pulitzer to Mitchell because of her “splendid narrative.” Indeed, few books offer such pure escapism and are so compulsively readable. It is a richly served story of the human will to survive told via a Georgia woman caught in the crosshairs of the Civil War. The book’s premise is deceptively simple and certainly nothing new. Girl meets boy and girl loses boy, and...
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