Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American writer and journalist.
At the age of 14, Mitchell entered the Washington Seminar, a private women's college where she studied revealing all her talent. When he turned 18, he enrolled in high school of medicine at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but his studies were interrupted due to the death of his mother. Margaret returns home to Atlanta, where in 1922 she marries Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. The marriage turns out to be a failure and he leaves his life leaving her the freedom to start over.
In the 1920s the author became a contributor to the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine: her interview with Rodolfo Valentino was memorable.
In 1926 Margaret remarried with John Marsh, an advertising agent, and quit her job to begin writing a novel set during the war of secession, the writing of which would keep her busy for nearly 10 years. The book was published in June 1936 under the title Gone with the wind, borrowing the suggestive verse of a poem by Ernest Dowson, and immediately became a bestseller: in just one month 180,000 copies were sold.
In 1937, thanks to the work, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize and the following year she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Negotiations with the film producer David O. Selznick also start almost immediately and want to make a film out of the book. Margaret is very resistant and would not like to participate in the writing of the script, or in the choice of the cast. In 1939, the novel was finally drawn from the novel of the same name directed by Victor Fleming who received 15 Oscar nominations and won 10 statuettes.
