How it all began...

While working for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine Margaret Mitchell was assigned a task of doing historical stories. She enjoyed this job very much as she got a chance to interview those who remembered the Old South, survived the hardships of war and Reconstruction. She found listening to their stories fascinating, as she herself was raised on the stories from that era.
In 1926 she had an unfortunate accident and broke her ankle, which later led to arthritis and she found herself confined to her home, on crutches, with the prospect of never walking again. As she had always been a keen reader, her husband John Marsh would fetch her loads of books from the library, ranging from murder stories to archeology. One day he came home with a stake of copy paper - he said that she'd read everything they had in the library except books on the exact sciences and told her to write a book.
When asked how long it took her to write the book, Margaret Mitchell would answer: ten years. The book was virtually finished by 1929 except for the first three chapters which she wrote already after the book was bought. In the meantime there were all kinds of family and health issues that she had to deal with, that kept her preoccupied.

The inspiration...

When Margaret Mitchell started on the book, she didn't have a preconceived idea of what the book was going to be about. She picked the subject she thought she knew best. Besides she was tired of Jazz Age Fiction and she said she "would try to write a book that didn't use the phrase 'son of a bitch' a single time". She never expected the book to sell because she didn't think there would be a publisher silly enough to buy a book, that was a "Victorian" type novel, long as "Anthony Adverse", about war and hard times in Georgia, with "precious little obscenity in it, no adultery and not a single degenerate...".

In real life Tara never existed, neither did the characters but practically all the incidents in the book are true. Of course they didn't happen to the same person and not all took place in Atlanta. Ms. Mitchell used to be very amused when her book was called too melodramatic. She'd say that for that time period melodrama is a word too mild to use!

The characters and their names...

Even though the historical background of the book is as accurate as Ms. Mitchell could possibly make it, she often emphasized that the characters she created, their lives, names and places they lived in were all fictional. She didn't want to embarass or put anyone on the spot, therefore while writing the book she did a detailed research, going through records in Clayton County, Fayette County, Savannah, Charleston and Atlanta from the period between 1840 and 1873 to make sure that there hadn't been anyone bearing the same names as the ones she picked for her characters.

Even though she explicitly said that all the characters were fictional there have been rumors about what the real prototypes were. It's believed that Margaret Mitchell was the prototype for Scarlett herself: the same unsubordinate spirit...many of her experiences became later Scarlett's doings. Her fellow reporter, Mr. Howland summed Peggy Mitchell as a combination of Scarlett's fire and toughness and Melanie's understanding, compassion and integrity. But if we go further we're led to believe that Ms. Mitchell drew scenes from her personal experience. In 1918 while she was away in college her mother died of flu; in the novel Scarlett comes home to find her mother dead of typhoid. In 1919 she performed an exotic dance at a party organized for charity by local debutantes and scandalized the Atlanta society. In 1920 she worked all night at an emeregency center when a major fire broke out in Atlanta; she was always the center of attention. A reporter H. S. Edwards suggested that perhaps Ms. Mitchell had been the real Melanie. Ms. Mitchell was shocked that someone would actually dare to make such a comparison. She said that Melanie had been fitted to a number of people, but her last of all. She reminded that she was the product of the Jazz Age and there were numbers of occasions when she shocked her elders!
The other story was that she modeled Scarlett after her "niece" Miss Betty Timmons but it was openly discredited by Ms. Mitchell.

To Margaret Mitchell Scarlett seemed to be a "normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could, doing what seemed to her the practical thing...saving her own hide". She didn't like the character she created, but she pointed out that there were some traits in Scarlett that were commendable: her courage, sense of responsibility for the weak, determination and perseverence in the face of defeat; but they were balanced by her bad qualities. People attacked Ms. Mitchell for making a "bad woman" the heroine of her story and a typical Southern woman, thus defaming ladies of bygone days. Ms. Mitchell resented those attacks and the fact that less attention was paid to the real ladies portrayed: Ellen and Melanie.

Margaret Mitchell mentioned that Melanie was really her heroine. In her own words: "I wanted to picture in Melanie and Ellen the true ladies of the old South, gentle and dear, frail of body perhaps, but never of courage, never swerving from what they believed the right path, and no matter what were called upon to do, by rude circumstances, always remaining ladies".
Also only a few people seemed to appreciate the sense of honor in Ashley - most people thought him weak instead.

It is also believed that there had been real prototypes for Rhett and Ashley: a young lieutentant Henry who died of wounds in the war in Europe and who had been Peggy's love (he might have been a prototype for Charles Hamilton as well), and Red Upshaw, her first husband, which whom she had a very stormy relationship.

To create the character of Rhett Butler Ms. Mitchell went through hundreds of ambro-types and daguerrotypes and questioned old ladies about their beaux and the men they remembered the longest. The type that stood out was a coastal, deep South type and face. Rhett Butler was typical of a certain mind and viewpoint of the sixties. While people in the North sometimes questioned Rhett's credibility, to the Southerners he seemed true to life.

As for the name Rhett Butler...As Ms. Mitchell put it: "I wanted a two-syllable Georgia Coast last name and a one-syllable South Carolina Coast first name. Butler was a prominent name in our State in the 1840s. I made him a Charlestonian because I had to make him a blockade runner, and there was little or no blockading done from Savannah...".

Scarlett had not gotten her name until 6 months before the publication of the book. In the manuscripts she existed as Pansy O'Hara (a character from one of her unpublished stories). The reasons Ms. Mitchell finally chose the name Katie Scarlett were that first of all, she had come across this name very often in Irish literature and second of all, she knew of the Scarlett family on the Georgia Coast but made sure that there was no one named like this in Clayton County in the years 1859-1873.

As for Melanie...Ms. Mitchell wrote in a letter to a reader: "I cannot tell you how Melanie came to be named Melanie, because that has always been her name ever since I first thought of her". As a matter of fact there were two working names for this character: Permelia and Melisande but eventually she decided to go with Melanie which she thought was a very beautiful name, and should be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and both e's should be short. She jokingly said she'd choke anyone who would dare to pronounce it MEE-laney...Wilkes should be pronounced as if it were Wilks.

At some point the O'Haras' plantation was called Fontenoy Hall later to become Tara. It should be pronounced "TA-ruh" with the accent on the first syllable, the first a short and the second a modified broad a (the first a not as in 'arm'); it does not rhyme with either with Sara or Laura (nonetheless in the movies it's pronounced like Sara).

The only character that was not completely made up by Ms. Mitchell was Prissy.

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• Harwell, Richard, ed. Margaret Mitchell's "GONE WITH THE WIND" Letters 1936-1949
• Bridges, Herb and Terryl C. Boodman GONE WITH THE WIND The Definitive Illustrated History of the Book, the Movie and the Legend
• Lambert, Gavin. "The Making of Gone with the Wind" The Atlantic Monthly (February 1973)