Editing Margaret Mitchell (section)

==Young storyteller==
An imaginative and precocious writer, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned 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 enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks.<ref name="before"/>{{rp|x, 14–15}} May Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college.<ref name=marsh/>{{rp|32}}

"Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in ''The Little Pioneers'', and plays "[[Make believe|Cowboys and Indians]]" in ''When We Were Shipwrecked''.<ref name="before"/>{{rp|16–17 & 19–33}}

Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in ''The Knight and the Lady'' (ca. 1909), in which a "good [[knight]]" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In ''The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden'' (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl.<ref name="before"/>{{rp|9 & 106–112}} The same themes were treated with increasing artistry  in ''Lost Laysen'', the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916,<ref name="lost">{{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_0684837684 |url-access=registration |title = Lost Laysen|publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn = 9780684837680|last1 = Mitchell|first1 = Margaret|date = May 6, 1997}}</ref>{{rp|7}} and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, ''Gone with the Wind'', which she began in 1926.<ref>Mitchell, Margaret. ''Gone with the Wind''. New York: Scribner, 1936. {{ISBN|978-1-4165-7346-3}}</ref>

In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as ''The Greaser'' (1913), a [[cowboy]] story set in Mexico.<ref name="before"/>{{rp|185–199}} In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book".<ref name="before"/>{{rp|47}}