On May 3, 1937, Margaret Mitchell received a phone call that would change her life in ways she had never wanted. Her novel, Gone with the Wind, had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The news came with a flood of interview requests, press inquiries, and the sudden, overwhelming attention of a nation that had already made her book the most talked-about work of fiction in a generation.
Mitchell’s response to the call was entirely in character. Hating publicity and never comfortable with the celebrity her writing had thrust upon her, she fled immediately. With her husband John Marsh and a small group of close friends, she drove to a gospel concert at a small Black church in Atlanta. The press scoured the city all evening but never found her.
It was a perfectly characteristic moment for the most unlikely literary sensation of the 20th century.
Margaret Mitchell: The Atlanta Writer Who Never Expected to Publish a Word
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia, into a family steeped in Southern history and Civil War memory. Her great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Mitchell had fought in the American Revolution. Her grandfather Russell Mitchell fought for the Confederacy and was shot twice in the head at the Battle of Antietam, miraculously surviving to father a large family and live long enough to shape his granddaughter’s imagination with firsthand accounts of the war.
Mitchell grew up surrounded by this living memory. As a child, she was taken horseback riding with Confederate veterans who told her stories of battles, plantations, and the collapse of the antebellum South. Her Irish-American grandmother Annie Fitzgerald Stephens had endured the war and Reconstruction while living on the family plantation, Rural Home, and the stories she told her granddaughter formed the emotional bedrock of what would eventually become Gone with the Wind.
Mitchell was, by any measure, a woman of formidable intelligence and independent spirit. Her mother, Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, was a committed suffragist who fought for women’s right to vote. Mitchell attended the prestigious Washington Seminary in Atlanta from 1914 to 1918, where she was a founding officer of the drama club and literary editor of the school yearbook. She enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1918, but her mother died during the influenza pandemic of that year and Mitchell returned to Atlanta, her formal education incomplete.
After a painful first marriage to an abusive bootlegger named Berrien Upshaw, which ended in divorce, Mitchell took a job writing feature articles for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. This was, as contemporaries noted, an unusual choice for a young woman of her social class in 1920s Atlanta. She wrote vividly and well, earning a genuine reputation as a journalist, before a serious ankle injury from a car accident in 1926 forced her to stop working.
Bedridden and then housebound during a long recovery, Mitchell began to read her way through everything in Atlanta’s Carnegie Library. When she had exhausted the supply, her second husband, John Marsh, a copy editor by profession, brought home a Remington Portable typewriter. “Write your own book to amuse yourself,” he told her. She set up the typewriter on an old sewing table and began.
Writing Gone with the Wind: Ten Years, 70 Envelopes, and One Hidden Manuscript
Mitchell worked on her Civil War novel for approximately ten years, though not continuously. She wrote the final chapter first and then composed the remaining chapters in no particular order, stuffing completed sections into manila envelopes that eventually accumulated into nearly seventy separate packets. When visitors arrived, she covered the manuscript with a towel, keeping the entire project a secret from almost everyone she knew.
Her original heroine was named Pansy O’Hara, a name she changed to Scarlett before publication. The book went through several prospective titles: Tomorrow Is Another Day, from the novel’s famous last line; Bugles Sang True; Not in Our Stars; Ba! Ba! Blacksheep; Tote the Weary Load; and Milestones were all considered. The title Mitchell finally chose came from the poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae” by the 19th-century English poet Ernest Dowson, whose third stanza contains the line: “I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind.” The phrase captured, for Mitchell, the sense of an entire civilization swept away by history.
She spent years researching the historical accuracy of the novel’s Civil War and Reconstruction details, writing to a reader in 1937 that she had spent “ten years reading thousands of books, documents, letters, diaries, and old newspapers” to verify the period’s details. She conducted formal and informal interviews with surviving witnesses to the era and went horseback riding with Confederate veterans to confirm the particulars of wartime life. She approached her novel not as romantic fantasy but as rigorous historical fiction.
The manuscript reached a publisher almost by accident. In April 1935, Harold Latham, an editor at the Macmillan Company in New York who was touring the South looking for new talent, heard from a mutual friend that Mitchell had been working on a manuscript. When Latham asked to see it, Mitchell initially denied having one. Then, apparently doubting herself after a friend made a cutting remark about her ever finishing anything, she tracked Latham down at his Atlanta hotel and delivered a messy pile of envelopes that barely fit into a suitcase he had to buy to carry them. Latham read the manuscript on the train back to New York and immediately recognized what he had. “I just couldn’t believe that a northern publisher would accept a novel about the War Between the States from the southern point of view,” Mitchell said later.
After Latham agreed to publish, Mitchell spent another six months rigorously checking historical references and rewriting the opening chapter multiple times. She and her husband John Marsh edited the final version together. The book that emerged was 1,037 pages long. It sold for three dollars.
June 1936: Publication and an Immediate National Phenomenon
Gone with the Wind was published on June 30, 1936, by Macmillan, and what followed was one of the most extraordinary publishing events in American literary history. The novel sold 50,000 copies in a single day. Within six months, one million copies had been printed. It was the top American fiction bestseller for both 1936 and 1937.
The novel tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, the willful, manipulative, and fiercely determined daughter of an Irish immigrant planter named Gerald O’Hara and his refined wife Ellen, growing up on the Georgia plantation of Tara in the years just before the Civil War. It follows her through the war itself, the fall of Atlanta, the destruction of the plantation economy, the brutal years of Reconstruction, two marriages she does not love, a third to the sardonic and magnetic Rhett Butler whom she understands too late, and the eventual loss of everything she has spent the novel fighting to hold onto. “After all, tomorrow is another day” are the novel’s last words, spoken by Scarlett as she resolves to fight on.
Contemporary reviews compared the book to William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Mitchell herself described it as a “Victorian type novel” and cited Charles Dickens as an inspiration. Helen Keller read the twelve-volume Braille edition. Remarkably, the novel sold extremely well in Nazi Germany too: within two days of its German publication in 1937, it had sold 12,000 copies, and by 1941 it had sold 276,000 copies in Germany, where it remained popular until American books were banned in 1942.
The novel’s success was a phenomenon that transcended literary categories. It was read by millions of people who rarely read novels. It was discussed in churches and barbershops and over kitchen tables across America. It touched something deep in the national imagination, particularly in a country still living through the Great Depression and finding in Scarlett O’Hara’s refusal to be defeated a reflection of its own desperate resilience.
May 3, 1937: The Pulitzer Prize and the Controversy It Created
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Gone with the Wind on May 3, 1937, by the Pulitzer Advisory Board. The 1937 Novel Jury, which had served together for the eighth and final consecutive year, consisted of Jefferson Fletcher, Robert Lovett, and Albert Paine. They submitted a list of six recommended novels to the Advisory Board, with Gone with the Wind at or near the top.
The Advisory Board, in the words of former Pulitzer Administrator John Hohenberg, “like the American public, wasted no time in embracing Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.” But the decision was not without controversy. Literary critics immediately pointed out that the jury had overlooked William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and John Dos Passos’ The Big Money, two works of considerably greater literary ambition and complexity. Critics accused the Pulitzer of rewarding commercial popularity over literary excellence, with literary critic W.J. Stuckey calling the selection “the apotheosis of the super-popular.”
The question at the heart of the controversy, whether a prize established to honor excellence should reflect the judgment of scholars or the preferences of a reading public, has followed the Pulitzer ever since. In this particular case, history has been relatively kind to the Advisory Board’s decision. Gone with the Wind was also awarded the second annual National Book Award for Fiction from the American Booksellers Association in 1937, adding institutional weight to its recognition.
Mitchell also won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1937, making it the first book to win both major American fiction prizes in the same year. A 2008 Harris poll found Gone with the Wind to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. A 2014 Harris poll produced the same result. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide, and Time magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included it on their list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
The full record of the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Margaret Mitchell for Gone with the Wind is preserved at the Pulitzer Prize official website entry for Margaret Mitchell.
The Film That Became a Legend: David O. Selznick and the 1939 Adaptation
Shortly after publication, Mitchell sold the motion picture rights to producer David O. Selznick for $50,000, the highest amount ever paid to a debut novelist at that time. The decision to adapt the book for the screen set in motion one of the most turbulent and celebrated productions in Hollywood history.
Selznick was determined to produce a film worthy of the novel’s scale. He interviewed 1,400 women for the role of Scarlett O’Hara and conducted 90 screen tests. Among those considered were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Paulette Goddard. The eventual choice was Vivien Leigh, a relatively unknown British actress whose career-defining performance as Scarlett became one of the most celebrated in cinema history.
To secure Clark Gable for the role of Rhett Butler, Selznick had to sell partial interest in the film to MGM, Gable’s studio, even though Gable reportedly did not want the part and feared he would not meet the audience’s expectations. Director George Cukor, who had spent nearly two years in pre-production on the film, was replaced after less than three weeks of shooting, reportedly in part because Gable was uncomfortable working with him. Victor Fleming, who was simultaneously directing The Wizard of Oz, was brought in from MGM to take over the production. Sam Wood served as a second director on overlapping sets as production raced forward under the intense pressure of Selznick’s perfectionism.
The cast included Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. McDaniel’s performance became one of the film’s most praised elements by critics across the racial divide of 1930s America, though the segregationist realities of that America meant she was not permitted to attend the film’s lavish premiere in Atlanta in December 1939. The premiere was held at the Loew’s Grand Theater on December 15, with three days of festivities. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event when he learned that the film’s Black actors had been barred. McDaniel personally persuaded him to attend.
At the 12th Academy Awards ceremony, held on February 29, 1940, at the Coconut Grove nightclub of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Gone with the Wind received 13 nominations and won eight Oscars, more than any film up to that point. It won Best Picture, Best Director for Victor Fleming, Best Actress for Vivien Leigh, Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, Best Screenplay for Sidney Howard, Best Cinematography for Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan, Best Film Editing for Hal Kern and James Newcom, and Best Art Direction for Lyle Wheeler. It was the first color film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Hattie McDaniel’s win made her the first African American to receive an Academy Award. The historic significance of the moment was accompanied by the indignity of its context: Selznick had to call in a personal favor to have McDaniel admitted to the hotel, which maintained a strict “no Blacks” policy, and she was seated at a segregated table at the back of the room, separated from her white co-stars. The ceremony was hosted by Bob Hope in his first of nineteen turns as host.
The Britannica entry on Gone with the Wind provides a thorough account of both the novel’s publication history and the film adaptation’s production and significance at the Britannica entry on Gone with the Wind.
Margaret Mitchell’s Last Years and the Legacy of One Book
Gone with the Wind was the only novel Mitchell published during her lifetime, and she never wrote another. She was often asked about a successor. Her answer was always some variant of the same response: she was too busy being the full-time author of Gone with the Wind to find the time to write anything else. Managing the book’s foreign rights, its translation into dozens of languages, the correspondence it generated, and the public life it imposed consumed her completely.
By the late 1940s, she was reportedly beginning to consider ideas for a second novel. That possibility was ended on August 11, 1949, when Mitchell was crossing a street in Atlanta on her way to a movie theater with her husband and was struck by a speeding car driven by an off-duty taxi driver. She suffered severe internal injuries and a skull fracture. She died five days later, on August 16, 1949. She was 48 years old.
The original manuscript of Gone with the Wind was reportedly burned after her death, either by her secretary or by a building custodian, in what her biographers describe as circumstances that remain somewhat ambiguous. Mitchell herself had reportedly expressed wishes that her personal papers be destroyed. Whether the destruction was complete or partial, most of the original manuscript no longer exists.
Gone with the Wind has never been without controversy. Its portrayal of the Confederacy draws from the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Civil War, presenting the antebellum South nostalgically and depicting Reconstruction as an unfair burden on white Southerners. Its depictions of enslaved people have been condemned by critics as romanticizing slavery and dehumanizing Black characters. These criticisms are well-founded and have grown more prominent over time. In 2020, HBO Max temporarily removed the 1939 film from its streaming platform for context updates.
Yet the novel and the film remain among the most read and most watched works in American cultural history. The novel remains the best-selling work of American fiction, with adjusted sales figures regularly cited as among the highest of any novel ever published in the United States. The 1939 film, when adjusted for inflation, remains the highest-grossing film in cinema history.
The New Georgia Encyclopedia’s comprehensive biography of Margaret Mitchell, covering her life, writing process, and legacy in her home state, is available at the New Georgia Encyclopedia entry on Margaret Mitchell.
Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize on May 3, 1937, and celebrated by vanishing into the Atlanta night at a gospel concert no journalist could find. She spent the rest of her brief life managing the consequences of a single extraordinary book that she had written, in her own words, simply to occupy her time during a long recovery from a car accident. Millions of readers have been grateful ever since that she had so much time to fill.