Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell was the daughter of the wealthy attorney Eugene Mitchell and the Irish immigrant and avid suffragette Maybelle Stephens. She grew up in Jackson Hill in Atlanta nearby her crude and explosive grandmother, from whom she heard firsthand stories about the Civil War. However, she did not learn that the South lost the war until she was 10 years old. Growing up, Mitchell preferred riding her pony to playing with dolls. She was an avid reader and writer of stories that often focused on the themes of honor and love. Two things that greatly influenced Mitchell when she was a child were the Atlanta Race Riot, as well as accompanying her mother to suffragette meetings (the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, passed when Mitchell was 19). Although Margaret’s brother believed that education ruined girls, her mother believed education was a girl’s tool for survival. With her mother’s encouragement, Mitchell attended Washington Seminary and then Smith College. Mitchell was engaged twice and eventually married Kinnard Upshaw, an alcoholic who later physically and emotionally abused her. Their marriage ended in divorce. Mitchell then married John Marsh when she was 29. Between her marriages, she wrote for the Atlanta Journal and continued to publish articles for four years until an ankle injury kept her home. Bored and needing something to do, she wrote Gone with the Wind, her only novel, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1949, she was hit by a drunk driver when she was crossing Peachtree Street. She died from her injuries a few days later.