Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8,1900 – August 16,1949) was the American author who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her immensely successful novel,Gone with the Wind,which was published in 1936.The novel is one of the most popular books of all time,selling more copies than any other hard-cover book,apart from the Bible,and is reputed to be still selling at 200,000 copies a year.An American film adaptation,released in 1939,became the highest-grossing film in the history of Hollywood,and received a record-breaking number of Academy Awards.
Italic text Mitchell was born in Atlanta,Georgia to Eugene Mitchell,a lawyer and Mary Isobel Stephens,a suffragist of Irish Catholic origin.Mitchell's brother Stephens was four years her senior.She often used the nickname Peggy.Her childhood,it seems,was spent in the laps of Civil War veterans and of her maternal relatives who lived through the war and the years that followed.They told her everything about the war,except that the Confederates had lost it.She was ten years old before she made that discovery.
After graduating from Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools),she attended Smith College,but withdrew following her final exams in 1918.She returned to Atlanta to take over the household after her mother's death earlier that year from the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 (and Mitchell used this pivotal scene,from her own life,to dramatize Scarlett's discovery of her mother's death from typhoid when Scarlett returns to Tara).Shortly afterward,she defied the conventions of her class and times,by taking a job at the Atlanta Journal,where she wrote a weekly column for the newspaper's Sunday edition as one of the first woman columnists at the South's largest newspaper.Mitchell's first professional writing assignment was an interview with an Atlanta socialite whose couture-buying trip to Italy was interrupted by the Fascist takeover.