Margaret Mitchell was born 8 November 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia. After a childhood surrounded by relatives who had survived the Civil War she enrolled at Smith College, Massachusetts, but was forced to return to the family home after her mother¿s death. After a difficult first marriage Mitchell became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine and was married again in 1925. In 1926, due to an ankle injury, Mitchell stopped work as a reporter and began to write the Civil War novel which would become Gone with the Wind (1936). She was persuaded by a friend at Macmillan to submit the novel and upon publication