Mitchell, Margaret (1900-1949), an American author, wrote Gone with the Wind (1936), one of the most popular novels of all time. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Gone with the Wind is a story of the South during the Civil War, written from the Southern point of view. The story begins just before the outbreak of the war in 1861. It describes the impact of the conflict on the South and ends during the postwar Reconstruction period. The two main characters—the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and the dashing Rhett Butler—rank among the best-known figures in American fiction. The motion picture Gone with the Wind (1939) became one of the most popular films ever made.
Mitchell was born on Nov. 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia, where much of the action of Gone with the Wind takes place. She wrote the novel over a period of 10 years. Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” Letters: 1936-1949 was published in 1976. Mitchell died on Aug. 16, 1949. Alexandra Ripley wrote a continuation of the Mitchell novel that was published in 1991 as Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
See also Gone with the Wind.
