October 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949

Biography

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell is an American author of the bestselling novel Gone with the Wind.

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 8, 1900, to Eugene Mitchell and Maria Isabella, a lawyer. Margaret had an older brother, Stephen. Their paternal ancestors came from Ireland; their maternal ancestors were French.

During the war both of Margaret’s grandfathers fought on the side of the Southerners; one was shot in the temple, only accidentally missing his brain, the other hiding from the victorious Yankees for a long time. Margaret’s father, who in his youth dreamed of becoming a writer, was chairman of the local historical society, so the children grew up in an atmosphere of stories about the startling events of the recent era.

Beginning her studies, she first attended Washington Seminary, then enrolled at the prestigious Smith College for Women (Massachusetts) in 1918. She returns to Atlanta to take charge of the farm after her mother’s death from the great Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 (Mitchell later uses this important scene from her life to dramatize the tragedy of Scarlett learning of her mother’s death from typhoid when she returned to the Tara plantation).

In 1922, under the name Peggy (her high school nickname), Mitchell begins work as a journalist, becoming the lead reporter for the Atlanta Journal. That same year she marries Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, but they divorce a few months later.

In 1925 she marries insurance agent John Marsh. An ankle injury sustained in 1926 makes it impossible for her to work as a reporter, and she leaves the newspaper.

The life of a typical provincial lady began, although Margaret’s house was different from other provincial houses in that it was full of some papers, which both guests and she herself laughed at. These papers were the pages of the novel Gone with the Wind, which was written from 1926 to 1936.

Episodes of the novel were written randomly, then put together. The editor of a major publisher who arrived in Atlanta learned of the voluminous manuscript (more than a thousand printed pages). However, Mitchell did not immediately agree to publish the book (the first title was Tomorrow is Another Day). Mitchell spent a year painstakingly working on the text, paying particular attention to historical details and dates. The title was changed to Gone with the Wind (a line from an Ernest Dowson poem).

The book was released in June 1936, with enormous publicity support, in which Mitchell herself played an active role. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Margaret herself was seriously involved in the affairs surrounding the sale of the novel, establishing rights and royalties and controlling editions in other languages.

Despite numerous requests from fans, Margaret Mitchell did not write another book.

On August 11, 1949, she was hit by a car (whose driver had previously worked as a cab driver, hence the not infrequent erroneous claim that she was hit by a cab) on her way to the movies, and she died five days later without regaining consciousness.