Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was an American author best known for her 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gone With the Wind. Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and lived most of her life in the city. Growing up in the South during the Jim Crow era, Mitchell was exposed to stories of the Civil War and Reconstruction that would eventually form the basis of her acclaimed novel.

Mitchell attended the Washington Seminary in her hometown and then the Smith College for Women in Massachusetts. When her father died, she returned to Atlanta and began to pursue a career as a magazine author and columnist. During this time, she wrote stories for The Atlanta Sunday Journal and later joined the editorial staff of the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine.

In 1925, Mitchell married John Marsh, a journalist and war correspondent. The couple moved to the affluent Peachtree Street area and Mitchell began to devote significant time to writing her first novel, which was inspired by her great-grandmother's stories of Confederate soldiers and Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Gone With the Wind. After years of research and writing, Mitchell's novel was published in 1936 to much praise. It eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and remains one of the best-selling novels of all time.

Though Gone With the Wind was Mitchell's only novel, her contribution to literature was nevertheless remarkable. Mitchell had the ability to effortlessly blend traditional Southern culture and romanticism with important social issues of the 1930s, such as racism and sexism. Her vivid descriptions of the South's Reconstruction era are still studied in historical textbooks today.

A committed feminist, Mitchell was an active member of the League of Women Voters and donated money to support African-American schools in the South during the Jim Crow era. She was also part of the Representation of Women in the New Deal Conference in Washington D.C. in 1936.

In 1949, Mitchell was tragically hit by a car and killed. While her life was marked by a single novel, Gone With the Wind stands as a major milestone in American literature and one that will commemorate legendary author Margaret Mitchell for generations to come.