Margaret Mitchell

Born Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, into a wealthy and politically prominent Southern family, she was the daughter of Eugene Muse Mitchell, an attorney, and Mary Isabel Stephens, a suffragist and Catholic activist. She grew up on stories of the Civil War from veteran relatives, riding her pony past the burnt ground of Atlanta and listening to her grandmother describe Sherman's march. She attended Smith College for one year before the death of her mother in the 1918 influenza pandemic called her home to keep house for her father and brother. She wrote for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine from 1922 to 1926, conducting irreverent interviews and feature pieces under the byline Peggy Mitchell, until an ankle injury kept her at home. To pass the long convalescence she began a novel about a Georgia girl named Pansy O'Hara surviving the war and Reconstruction. She worked on it for nearly a decade, in stacks of unnumbered envelopes, before reluctantly handing the manuscript to a Macmillan editor in 1935. Gone with the Wind (1936) sold a million copies in six months and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. She refused to write a sequel, declined almost every interview, and devoted her later years to private philanthropies and to answering, by hand, the thousands of letters readers sent her. On August 11, 1949, crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta with her husband John Marsh to see a film, she was struck by a speeding off-duty taxi driver. She died five days later, at the age of forty-eight, without ever publishing another novel.

In April 1935, the Macmillan editor Harold Latham came through Atlanta looking for manuscripts. Mitchell told him she had none. A friend then remarked that she was not serious enough to write a novel. Stung, she gathered the manila envelopes stuffed with draft chapters from around her apartment and delivered them to Latham's hotel, where he bought a suitcase to carry them.