Margaret Mitchell

During her teenage years, she was in love with a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was her boyfriend of four years. However, he was wounded during war and succumbed to injuries a few days later. This left Mitchell devastated because he was believed to be ‘the great love’ of her life.

She went through an appendectomy in 1919, following which she gave up her dreams of pursuing a journalistic career.

During a charity ball, she danced with an Apache dancer and kissed him while performing, which shocked the aristocratic Atlantic society. She was known for her flirtatious ways and was even engaged to five men at one time.

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900 to Mary Isabel and Eugene Muse Mitchell in Atlanta, Georgia. Her family was fairly wealthy and was also politically involved. She had two brothers, out of whom one died in infancy.

She was fondly called as ‘Jimmy’ and she behaved like a boy till the age of 14.

From a very young age, Mitchell was an avid reader and would read a lot of ‘boys’ stories. Two of her favorite books as a child were ‘The Phoenix and the Carpet’ and ‘Five Children and It’.

Inspired by the books she read, she soon began writing stories in her notebook and even unofficially decided a name for her publishing enterprise titled, ‘Urchin Publishing Co.’.

In 1909, she wrote, ‘The Knight and the Lady’, the first of her stories and four years later, she wrote, ‘The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden’.

After she got married, she began to write feature articles for ‘The Atlanta Journal’. Her first story, ‘Atlanta Girl Sees Italian Revolution’ was published in 1922. The next year she wrote, ‘Valentino Declares He Isn’t a Sheik’.

From 1923 to 1926, she had written as many as 129 article pieces, 85 news stories and manifold book reviews. She later quit the job and decided that she wanted to be a full-time housewife.

In order to get rid of the dullness in her life in 1926 and after suffering from a broken ankle, she started working on a novel that would later be titled, ‘Gone with the Wind’. She completed a large part of the book in the next three years with a typewriter.

The novel was complete almost a decade later and Harold Latham, a publishing supervisor for the Macmillan publishing company insisted on seeing her manuscripts. After he read her work, the publishing house immediately gave her $500 advance and 10 percent of the fees.

She reworked and finalized her novel and finally published ‘Gone with the Wind’, which was 1,037 pages long, in 1936. The book became a huge hit with the readers and she became popular overnight.

‘Gone with the Wind’, published in 1936, was written for nearly ten years before it was published. She became an instantaneous celebrity with the novel and the book even gave way to a film adaptation in 1939. Her only published novel during her lifetime, the book went on to be printed in over 40 countries and was the best-selling novel in American literary history at the time of its publication. When the book was distributed, it sold more copies than any other book by an American author. The book still enjoys widespread success following her death.