Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, born on 8 November 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia, was raised by Eugene Muse Mitchell and suffragette Mary Isabel Stephens. Growing up in a racially segregated environment with Confederate ties influenced her worldview and writing. Educated privately, she attended Washington Seminary and later Smith College but left after her mother's death in 1919. Mitchell married Berrien Upshaw in 1922, enduring abuse before divorcing and marrying John Robert Marsh. Her journalism career at the Atlanta Journal preceded her writing "Gone with the Wind," published in 1936, achieving unprecedented success. Mitchell died at 49 in a car accident on 11 August 1949.