Margaret Mitchell, 1900 - 1949 Novelist Margaret Mitchell was born November 8, 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia to Eugene Muse Mitchell, a prominent attorney, and Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, a suffragette. She attended Smith College from 1918-1919 to study psychiatry, but she had to return to Atlanta when her mother died during the great flu epidemic of 1918. In 1922, she married Red Upshaw but left him three months later and had the marriage annulled. In 1925, she married John Marsh, the best man at her first wedding. He died in 1952. Mitchell joined the prestigious Debutante Club, but her public drinking, smoking and her performance of an Apache dance in a sensual costume, ended that for her. She was refused membership to the Atlanta Junior League. She began her writing career as a feature writer for the Atlanta Journal. She authored a freelance column for the paper called Elizabeth Bennett's Gossip. Mitchell is the author of the best selling novel of all time, "Gone with the Wind" (1936).
