Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949) was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner, a native and lifelong resident of Georgia. She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "Maybelle" Stephens, was a suffragist and Catholic activist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.
Mitchell's family on her father's side were descendants of Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777, and served in the American Revolutionary War. Thomas Mitchell was a surveyor by profession. He was on a surveying trip in Henry County, Georgia, at the home of Mr. John Lowe, about 6 miles from McDonough, Georgia, when he died in 1835 and is buried in that location. William Mitchell, born December 8, 1777, in Lisborn, Edgefield County, South Carolina, moved between 1834 and 1835, to a farm along the South River in the Flat Rock community in Georgia. William Mitchell died February 24, 1859, at the age of 81 and is buried in the family graveyard near Panola Mountain State Park. Her great-grandfather Issac Green Mitchell moved to farm along the Flat Shoals Road located in the Flat Rock community in 1839. Four years later he sold this farm to Ira O. McDaniel and purchased a farm 3 miles farther down the road on the north side of the South River in DeKalb County, Georgia.

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