Mitchell， Margaret （1900-1949）， American author， who wrote Gone with the Wind （1936）， one of the most popular novels of all time. Born in Atlanta， Georgia， she attended Smith College. She was a reporter and feature writer for the Atlanta Journal from 1922 until 1926， when she began writing Gone with the Wind， which she completed ten years later. This romantic picture of life in the South during the American Civil War became a best-seller almost immediately and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It was made into a motion picture that， after its release in 1939， became one of the most popular and praised of all films. In 1995 the manuscript for Lost Laysen， a short novel Mitchell had written in 1916， was discovered. It was published in 1996.