Margaret Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Irish-Catholic parents. From the very beginning, she was a storyteller. Before she could even write, she made up tales and crafted her own adventure books out of cardboard. As a child, she wrote hundreds of these homemade stories. Her creative drive went well beyond the page — she also wrote, directed, and acted in plays while attending the private Woodberry School in Atlanta.
In 1918, Mitchell enrolled at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her time there was cut short when her mother died just four months into her first year. Mitchell returned to Atlanta, and with that, her college career came to an end. Back home, she prepared for debutante season — a formal social tradition for young women of her class — where she met Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. They married, but the union collapsed after just four months when Upshaw left for the Midwest and never returned.
Mitchell was not the kind of woman who fit neatly into the roles expected of her. She was a tomboy, a defiant debutante, and a brazen flapper. She became one of Georgia’s first female newspaper reporters, working for the Atlanta Journal. She also funded African-American education as a philanthropist, an act that carried real personal risk in the segregated South of that era.
In 1926, a broken ankle left Mitchell unable to move around freely. Rather than sit idle, she began writing a novel set during the Civil War era. That manuscript would become Gone With the Wind. She spent years refining it before her publisher, Macmillan, released the book in 1936. It was an immediate sensation. The novel sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 27 languages.
The Pulitzer Prize followed in 1937, and the photos below capture Mitchell at home in Atlanta receiving congratulations from friends, fans, and colleagues after the announcement. The scenes show a woman who appeared genuinely overwhelmed by the response — telegrams and letters piled up as the news spread across the country.
Just three years after the Pulitzer win, the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind was released in 1939 to widespread acclaim. By that point, Mitchell had become one of the most recognized literary figures in the United States. In 1938, during her first New York interview, she was photographed holding a copy of her bestselling novel at her publisher’s office — a rare public appearance for a woman who largely kept out of the spotlight.
In 1941, Mitchell traveled to Kearny, New Jersey, to christen the USS Atlanta, a U.S. Navy cruiser. She had recently joined the Atlanta branch of the American Women’s Voluntary Services, a wartime organization that supported the Allied effort during World War II. The event drew significant press attention, given Mitchell’s fame.
On the evening of August 11, 1949, Mitchell and her husband John Marsh were walking to a nearby movie theater on Peachtree Street in Atlanta — the very street made famous in her novel — when a taxi driver named Hugh D. Gravitt struck her. She was knocked down on the pavement and suffered severe injuries. Mitchell died five days later, on August 16, 1949, at the age of 48.
