Gone With the Wind Movie Contract.

MITCHELL, Margaret.

Item Number: 52012

Atlanta, Georgia: Macmillan Company, 1935.

Certified Copy of the original Macmillan publishing contract for Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. Partly-Printed Document. Legal folio format. This copy of the original contract of August 6, 1935 was prepared and notarized for Selznick International Pictures (the eventual producer of the 1939 motion picture “Gone With the Wind”) on August 3, 1936. It is accompanied by the August 6, 1936 1 page typed letter of Cohen, Cole, Weiss & Wharton, Attorneys and Counsellors at Law, 61 Broadway, New York to Selznick International Pictures, with which the certified copy was enclosed. All crisp and clean in custom burgundy morocco backed marble board folding case.

In 1926, Margaret "Peggy" Mitchell began to write what would become the best-selling Civil War novel of all time. Mitchell began the story with the final chapter, in which her southern debutante heroine's husband walks away from her, and continued to add chapters over the course of the following decade. A severe automobile accident in 1934 left Mitchell in a neck brace for almost an entire year, prompting her to attempt to complete the project. The incomplete manuscript was first seen by the MacMillan Company in April of 1935 upon which Mitchell was immediately asked to sign a contract for 'a novel of the South (exact title to be determined'. Mitchell finished the manuscript in February of 1936 and the book sold a record of 1,383,000 copies by the end of 1937 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Macmillan first approached MGM's Louis B. Mayer with an asking price of $100,000 for the movie rights to the book. Mayer declined, and the rights were eventually sold to Selznick International Pictures in 1939. Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, the film premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939 and made a celebrity of the previously unknown author.