click to buy

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia in November of 1900. Her mother was a suffragist and father a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society.

Mitchell grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the Confederate Army had fought there during the American Civil War. At the age of fifteen she wrote in her journal: “If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I’d be a prize fighter – anything for the thrills.”

Mitchell attended Smith College in 1918, but returned home when her mother died in 1919 to help her father and brother. Mitchell’s independent spirit clashed with her father’s conservatism. She embraced the Jazz age and wrote about it in nonfiction, like in her article ‘Dancers Now Drown Out Even the Cowbell’ in the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. In 1922 she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, a bootlegger. That same year she began her career in journalism writing under the name Peggy Mitchell writing reviews, and articles for the Atlanta Journal. Her marriage to Upshaw was annulled in 1924, and she soon remarried a newspaper man, John Robert Marsh. Marsh encouraged her to write.

From 1926 to 1929 she wrote her first novel. A one thousand page book titled, Gone With the Wind. The novel was published by the Macmillan Publishing Company in 1936 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. In 1949, while crossing the intersection of Peachtree and 13th , in Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding taxi. Five days later, on August 16, she died.