SOUTHPORT, Conn. -- Long thought burned, the final typescript of the last four chapters of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," has turned up in, gasp, Yankee territory - Southport, Conn., according to The New York Times. The chapters, prepared with a Royal typewriter and corrected by hand in several places by the author, contain some of the book's most well-known lines, including "My dear, I don't give a damn" and "After all, tomorrow is another day."
The chapters were given to Southport's Pequot Library in the 1950s by Mitchell's publisher, George Brett Jr., president of Macmillan and a benefactor of the library, but have mostly been in storage.
The chapters were found recently when a woman working on a book about Mitchell's book contacted the library looking for GWTW material donated by Brett. The woman was looking for foreign editions and for books with inscriptions from the author to Macmillan. The library has books with inscriptions, the New York Times reports, but the inscriptions don't say much. The relationship between Mitchell and Brett was not warm, at least in early years, in part because Mitchell did not think Brett got her a good deal for production of the movie.
The pages will be displayed at the Connecticut library starting Sunday and then brought to Atlanta, Mitchell's hometown, in time for the 75th anniversary of the novel's publication in June. The Pequot Library says the typescript will be on loan to the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead until September.
Library officials told the newspaper they aren't sure why Brett had the pages, but they prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt. They might have been a gift from Mitchell, they surmised, or were, perhaps, tucked away by accident and found later. Joan Youngken, the library's guest curator, told the newspaper it's not likely Brett would have given the chapters to the library to display if he wasn't supposed to have them.
(Atlanta Business Chronicle)