Margaret Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900.  Her mother was from Irish Catholic ancestry ad her father descended from Scotch-Irish, and French ancestors.  As a child, Mitchell's relatives, particularly her mother and great aunts, told her stories about The South and the Civil War; these stories served as a basis for the characters and events of Gone With the Wind. Mitchell grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and her father was the president of the Atlanta Historical Society. She attended Smith College but when her mother died from flu, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take care of her father and her older brother. In 1933, Mitchell began writing for the Atlanta Journal under her nickname Peggy. She worked for the Newspaper for four years and wrote 129 signed articles. She married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw in 1922, but soon divorced. She married again in 1925 to John Robert Marsh, who had been best man at her first wedding. A year after her second marriage Mitchell resigned from the Atlanta Journal due to an ankle injury. Her husband encouraged her to write a novel.

For ten years Margaret Mitchell worked on her novel, although most of it was complete by 1929. In 1935 Harold Latham, editor for Macmillan, began traveling around the country in search of new manuscripts. When he came to Atlanta he heard of Mitchell's manuscript, but she was reluctant to show him for fear that a northern publisher would reject a book about the Civil War from a southerner's point of view. By July 1935, Macmillan had decided to publish the novel which was titled Tomorrow is Another Day. Mitchell then spent six months checking the facts of the novel; she wanted to be sure that all the details were historically accurate. The final title Gone with the Wind was taken from Ernest Dowson's 1896 poem "Cynara".  Macmillan spent a large sum of money on advertising, which was unusual for an unknown author. The novel was published on June 30, 1936 and sold two million copies within a year.  She remained humble about the success of the book and never considered herself an exceptional novelist, even though Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. In 1936, Mitchell signed a contract granting the film rights for 50,000 dollars, the highest Hollywood had ever paid for a novel. Mitchell also demanded that she have no involvement with the production of the movie; she disliked media attention and refused interviews, autographs and speeches. 

On August 11, 1949, Margaret Mitchell was struck by a cab and died five days later. She was buried in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta and at her request her husband destroyed most of her manuscripts  after her death. However, one manuscript survived.  Lost Laysen was written in 1916 and given to one of her suitors.  The text is a love story set in the South Pacific and was published in 1996.

Articles About Mitchell, Margaret

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind	November 27, 2007
Margaret Mitchell admired people who had gumption, people who fought their way through hard times triumphantly and came out survivors. She said that if her novel, Gone with the Wind, had a theme it was survival, "I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn't."