Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist, born on November 8, 1900, and a lifelong resident of Georgia. She came from a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel “Maybelle” Stephens, was a suffragist and Catholic activist. Mitchell grew up in and around Atlanta at a time when the Civil War and Reconstruction were still living memory for many people around her.

Mitchell is best known for Gone with the Wind, the American Civil War-era novel that was the only novel published during her lifetime. The book brought her major national recognition: she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936, followed by the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. After her death, more of her writing reached readers, including a collection of her girlhood writings, the teenage novella Lost Laysen, and a book-form republication of newspaper articles she had written for The Atlanta Journal.

Her sense of history was formed close to home. On her father’s side, her family traced its Georgia roots to Thomas Mitchell, a Scottish settler who came to Wilkes County in 1777 and served in the American Revolutionary War. Her grandfather Russell Crawford Mitchell enlisted in the Confederate States Army in 1861, served in Hood’s Texas Brigade, was badly wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg, and later made a fortune supplying lumber for the rebuilding of Atlanta. On her mother’s side, Irish immigrant forebears settled in Georgia, and her grandfather John Stephens became a Confederate captain and, after the war, a prosperous real estate developer and one of the founders of Atlanta’s mule-drawn Gate City Street Railroad.

Mitchell’s early childhood on Jackson Hill was surrounded by family stories and strong personalities. Her maternal grandmother, Annie Stephens, lived nearby in a bright red Victorian house with yellow trim. Mitchell later had a quarrelsome relationship with her, but Annie Stephens was also an important source of first-hand information about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. As a little girl, Mitchell also rode in the afternoons with a Confederate veteran and heard detailed accounts of battles. She later said that she did not learn until age ten that the South had lost the war, a shock that showed how powerfully childhood impressions had shaped her view of the past.

There was also a spirited side to Mitchell’s girlhood. After her dress caught fire on an iron grate when she was about three, her mother dressed her in boys’ pants out of fear that it might happen again. Mitchell was nicknamed “Jimmy,” after a comic-strip character, and said she was a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen. Her brother remembered her as a tomboy who could still enjoy dolls and who liked riding her Texas plains pony. That mixture of strict upbringing, family pride, local memory, and restless imagination helps explain why Mitchell’s work continues to draw readers: her words came from a world she had listened to closely, from childhood onward.