Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900. She is best known for Gone with the Wind, the only novel she published during her lifetime. Set during the American Civil War era, the novel became a major literary success, earning Mitchell the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Before her success as a novelist, Mitchell worked as a journalist, writing newspaper articles for The Atlanta Journal. Her journalism work was later collected and republished in book form. Beyond Gone with the Wind, Mitchell wrote other works during her lifetime that were not published until after her death, including a collection of girlhood writings and a novella titled Lost Laysen that she had written as a teenager. Mitchell spent most of her life in her native Atlanta, where she died in 1949.