Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born November 8, 1900, and worked as a journalist for The Atlanta Journal before turning to fiction. Her sole published novel during her lifetime, Gone with the Wind, arrived in 1936 and swept the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel that year and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. She never published another novel. Mitchell died August 16, 1949. Decades later, a novella she'd written as a teenager, Lost Laysen, surfaced alongside a collection of her girlhood writings and her old newspaper articles, all issued in book form.