|
Margaret Mitchell was
born in Atlanta, Georgia in November of 1900. Her mother was a suffragist and
father a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical
Society.
Mitchell grew up
listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the Confederate
Army had fought there during the American Civil War. At the age of
fifteen she wrote in her journal: "If I were a boy, I would try for West
Point, if I could make it, or well I'd be a prize fighter - anything for
the thrills."
Mitchell attended Smith
College in 1918, but returned home when her mother died in 1919 to help
her father and brother. Mitchell’s independent spirit clashed with her
father's conservatism. She embraced the Jazz age and wrote about it in
nonfiction, like in her article 'Dancers Now Drown Out Even the Cowbell'
in the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. In 1922 she married Berrien
Kinnard Upshaw, a bootlegger. That same year she began her career in
journalism writing under the name Peggy Mitchell writing reviews, and
articles for the Atlanta Journal. Her marriage to Upshaw was annulled in
1924, and she soon remarried a newspaper man, John Robert Marsh. Marsh
encouraged her to write.
From 1926 to 1929 she
wrote her first novel. A one thousand page book titled,
Gone With the
Wind. The novel was published by the Macmillan Publishing Company in
1936 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. In 1949, while crossing the
intersection of Peachtree and 13th , in Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was
struck by a speeding taxi. Five days later, on August 16, she died.
|
SLR Recommends
DVD on Sale!
|
