Margaret Mitchell House

This guide to the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta opens with two suspicious fires, in 1994 and 1996, that gutted the building yet left one small ground-floor apartment almost untouched. It follows Margaret Mitchell into that same apartment, which she and her husband John Marsh called the Dump, and the day he came home from the library empty-handed and told her to write her own book. You'll hear how she wrote a Civil War epic on a secondhand typewriter between 1926 and 1932, propped off an old leg injury, in the alcove ahead of you by three tall windows. Stand there and picture the folding sewing table she used as a desk.