Based on almost 200 previously unpublished letters and extensive interviews with their closest associates, Walker's biography of Margaret Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, offers a new look into a devoted marriage and fascinating partnership that ultimately created a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. This edition of Walker's biography celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936. In lively extracts from their letters to family and friends, John and Margaret, who also went by Peggy, describe the stormy years of their courtship, their bohemian lifestyle as a young married couple, the arduous but fulfilling years when Peggy was writing her famous novel, the thrill of its acceptance for publication and its literary success, and the excitement of the making of the movie. In telling the private side of this twenty-four-year marriage, author Marianne Walker reveals a long-suspected truth: Gone With the Wind might have never been written were it not for John Marsh. He was Peggy's best friend and constant champion, and he became her editor, proofreader, researcher, business manager, and the inspiration and motivation behind her writing. At every point, including the turbulent years of Mitchell's first marriage to Red Upshaw, it was John who provided the intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and editorial insights that allowed Peggy to channel her talents into the creation of her astounding Civil War epic. From years of meticulous research, Marianne Walker details the intimate and moving love story between a husband and wife, and between a writer and her editor.

Growing up in a fast, dysfunctional world was normal for Alex. Everywhere she went, she was subject to abuse. She would catch the public bus at the age of eight years old in the rough city streets of DC. In the 1980s, watching drunks and drug addicts crowd the bus stop was everyday life. Forced to become street smart after being a ward of the courts for eight years, Alex thought things could not get any worse. Not surprisingly, they did. After trusting someone that she thought had her best interests at heart, she soon finds herself married and pregnant at the age of fifteen, and now a domestic violence victim. Determined not to let her present dictate her future, she began to reach out to God, with writing as her key to all her misery. With faith and strong determination, she changed her life path from being an abused child sexually and physically. As you read this book, you will learn to allow the inner child in you to speak and brighten your path while you discover that until you release your past, you too are still a child within.