Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, known as Margaret Mitchell and sometimes by her pseudonym Peggy Mitchell, was a prominent American novelist and journalist. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, her Southern upbringing and the rich local history would heavily influence her most acclaimed work, Gone with the Wind. This epic Civil War-era novel earned her the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction as the Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Despite the fact that Gone with the Wind was the only novel she published during her lifetime, it became a timeless classic, later adapted into an iconic film by director Victor Fleming in 1939.

Mitchell's career also included journalism, with her contributions to The Atlanta Journal eventually being republished in book form. Her untimely death was caused by an accident, where she was struck by a speeding drunk driver in 1949. Posthumously, her girlhood writings and a novella written in her teenage years, titled Lost Laysen, were published, adding to her literary legacy.