born Nov. 8, 1900, Atlanta, Ga., U.S.
died Aug. 16, 1949, Atlanta
U.S. writer.
Mitchell attended Smith College and then wrote for The Atlanta Journal before spending 10 years writing her one book, Gone with the Wind (1936, Pulitzer Prize; film, 1939). A story of the American Civil War and Reconstruction from the white Southern point of view, it was almost certainly the largest-selling novel in the history of U.S. publishing to that time. A parody of the book, as told from a slave's point of view, The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, was published in 2001.