Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell was an American author and journalist, born in Atlanta on 8 November 1900. She grew up in the city and later worked as a newspaper writer there, an experience that sharpened her eye for detail and for the speech of ordinary people. She was also steeped in local memories of the Civil War and its aftermath, which family and neighbours often recalled.

She is remembered above all for her only novel, Gone With the Wind, published in 1936. It became one of the best-selling American books of its time and was adapted into a celebrated film. The novel remains widely read, and it is also much debated for the way it presents the antebellum South, slavery and the Confederate cause. Mitchell died in 1949, at the age of 48. Her single great success keeps her a central, and complicated, figure in American popular literature.