"The discovery - quite by accident - of the cache of writing by the best-known and best-selling author of all time contained in this volume seems almost too romantic to be true. Eskridge and Thomas found two hundred pages of short stories, fairy tales, journal entries, essays, and a one-act play penned from ages eight through seventeen by the author of the classic Gone With the Wind. ". "By her own order, all of Mitchell's personal papers were to have been destroyed after her death. The world applauded when, in the mid-1990s, a lone Mitchell short story was discovered and published. Now, with this more recent and much further ranging discovery of girlhood writings, the portrait of this prodigious talent and precocious imagination is complete. "--BOOK JACKET.