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Margaret Mitchell was born 8 November 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia. After a childhood surrounded by relatives who had survived the Civil War she enrolled at Smith College, Massachusetts, but was forced to return to the family home after her mother's death. After a difficult first marriage Mitchell became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine and was married again in 1925. In 1926, due to an ankle injury, Mitchell stopped work as a reporter and began to write the Civil War novel which would become Gone with the Wind (1936). She was persuaded by a friend at Macmillan to submit the novel and upon publication it sold more copies than any other novel in American history and was awarded a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. The 1939 Hollywood film adaptation garnered eight Oscars and became the highest-grossing film of all time in the US and Canada. Mitchell died tragically on 16 August 1949. Her novella Lost Laysen was published posthumously in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. By 2000 30 million copies of Gone with the Wind had sold in 40 languages.
This is beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best. I would go so far as to say that it is, in narrative power . . . surpassed by nothing in American fiction. * The New York Times * For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before * The New Yorker * Gone With The Wind is a rich, complicated book . . . we can and should argue about a story that's achieved such a hold on the American imagination * The Washington Post * Mitchell carefully analyses the nature of human resilience, and holds up hopefulness as the critical tool for getting through the worst times... most of all, in the[se] bleak days . . . it is Scarlett's belief that tomorrow will be better that feels endlessly and gleefully hopeful. After all, as she knows so well: Tomorrow is another day. * The Guardian * Anyone who has not read it has missed one of the greatest literary experiences a reader can have.
