Margaret Mitchell - Young Storyteller

Young Storyteller

A storyteller from a very young age, the first stories Margaret Mitchell wrote were about her animals, and then she progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She created book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing company: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. May Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and there were several boxes of her stories stored in the Mitchell home by the time she went off to college.

"Margaret" is a character galloping on a pony in The Little Pioneers, and she is playing "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked.

'Love and honor' is an early theme in Mitchell's writing, as in The Knight and the Lady (c. 1909), where the "good knight" and the "bad knight" duel with swords for a lady. The theme appears again in The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (c. 1913), where a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and ultimately win the girl. It also appears in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began writing in 1926.

In her pre-teens, Mitchell began writing stories set in foreign locations such as, The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she also wrote two American Civil War stories, one of them annotated, "237 pages are in this book".