Margaret Mitchell
1 book analyzed
Biography
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (1900-1949) was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, surrounded by Civil War stories told by relatives and Confederate veterans. Her grandmother had watched Sherman's army burn Atlanta from her porch. Mitchell was a tomboy who scandalized Atlanta society -- she smoked, performed a provocative Apache dance at a debutante ball, and worked as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal at a time when few women did. She began writing Gone with the Wind in 1926 while recovering from an ankle injury, and spent nearly a decade on it. The novel, her only book, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and became the bestselling American novel of the twentieth century. Mitchell was struck by a car and killed in Atlanta in 1949 at age 48. She wrote no sequel and resisted all efforts to continue Scarlett's story.