“Melly is the only woman friend I ever had,” she thought forlornly, “the only woman except Mother who really loved me. She’s like Mother, too. Everyone who knew her has clung to her skirts.”

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.