“I bare my soul and you are suspicious! No, Scarlett, this is a bona fide honorable declaration. I admit that it's not in the best of taste, coming at this time, but I have a very good excuse for my lack of breeding. I'm going away tomorrow for a long time and I fear that if I wait till I return you'll have married some one else with a little money. So I thought, why not me and my money? Really, Scarlett, I can't go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.”

American novelist and journalist

Margaret Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist, best known for Gone with the Wind, published during her lifetime in 1936. She lived from 1900 to 1949, and the book brought her both the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. She wrote only one novel that appeared while she was alive, but her earlier writing also reached readers later. After her death, a novella she had written as a teenager, Lost Laysen, and a collection of her girlhood writings were published, along with newspaper articles she had written for The Atlanta Journal, later issued in book form.