Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Gone with the Wind | 1936 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Lost Laysen | 1996 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell | 2000 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936-1949 | 1976 |
| A Dynamo Going to Waste: Letters to Allen Edee, 1919-1921 | 1985 |
| Margaret Mitchell: Reporter | 2000 |
About Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist from Atlanta, Georgia, who published a single novel in her lifetime. That novel, “Gone with the Wind” (1936), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
She was born in Atlanta on 8 November 1900, the daughter of Eugene Mitchell, an attorney, and May Belle Stephens, a suffragist. As a child she heard stories of the Civil War from relatives and from Confederate veterans, and she wrote stories and plays from an early age. She attended Washington Seminary in Atlanta and entered Smith College in Massachusetts in 1918, but left after her first year, following her mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, to keep house for her father.
In 1922 Mitchell joined the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, writing under the byline Peggy Mitchell. Over about four years she wrote 129 feature articles as well as news stories and book reviews. She married John Marsh, her second husband, in 1925, and an ankle injury ended her newspaper career in 1926.
She began her novel in 1926 and wrote most of it over the next three years; its heroine was called Pansy O’Hara until shortly before publication. Harold Latham, an editor at Macmillan, read the manuscript in 1935 and the book appeared in June 1936. “Gone with the Wind” follows Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, through the Civil War and Reconstruction. It sold more than a million copies in its first six months. The film rights went to David O. Selznick for $50,000, and the 1939 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Mitchell was struck by a car while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta on 11 August 1949 and died five days later, aged 48. Several of her writings were published long after her death. “Lost Laysen”, a novella she wrote in 1916 at the age of fifteen and gave to a boyfriend, was rediscovered in 1994 and published in 1996. Her girlhood stories were collected in “Before Scarlett” and her Atlanta Journal articles in “Margaret Mitchell: Reporter”, both in 2000, and two volumes of her letters have also appeared.
Photo: Al Aumuller, New York World-Telegram and the Sun (Library of Congress), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).