When Margaret Mitchell was about three years old, her dress caught fire. Fearing it would happen again, her mother began dressing her in boys’ pants. Her brother insisted she would have to be a boy named ‘Jimmy’ to play with him. Consequently she continued calling herself a boy named Jimmy until she was fourteen. [1]
Margaret Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist who wrote only one book published during her lifetime, the American Civil War novel, Gone with the Wind, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.
Mitchell was born on 8 December 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent Southern family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was a lawyer and historian, and her mother, Mary Isabel “Maybelle” was a suffragist and Catholic activist. She had two older brothers – Russell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896. She spent a happy and active childhood playing in boys’ pants and riding her pony.
Even before she could write, Mitchell began making up stories and dictated them to her mother. Later she would make her own books with cardboard covers, filling them with adventure stories and developing the habit of reading at an early age. She would sit on her grandmother’s veranda and listen avidly to stories of the Civil War.
When Gone with the Wind was published in 1936 it was an immediate bestseller and speculation began as to which actors could take the main parts in a movie. When the film premiered in Atlanta in 1939, after a very troubled production, it broke box office records, won ten Academy Awards, and remains the highest-grossing film in history.
Margaret Mitchell died tragically on 16 August 1949 after she was hit by a speeding taxi driven by a drunken driver.
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