In the spring of 1926, Mitchell resigned from her job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine due to an ankle injury. She turned her attention to writing a novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction from a Southern point of view. For the next nine years, Mitchell worked at her novel sporadically, composing episodes out of sequence and often drafting multiple versions of single scenes, resulting in a disorganized collection of draft chapters sent to the Macmillan publishing company. After signing a contract for the book with Macmillan in the summer of 1935, she scrambled to organize and fact-check the book in seven months. It published as Gone With the Wind on June 30, 1936.