Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, into a family steeped in Southern history and storytelling.
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second child of Eugene Muse Mitchell, a prominent attorney, and Mary Isabelle "Maybelle" Stephens Mitchell, a suffragist and devout Catholic. Her family had deep roots in Georgia, and both sides had lived through and survived the American Civil War and Reconstruction, experiences that would later saturate her most famous work.
Growing up in a household where relatives frequently recounted vivid tales of the Civil War and its aftermath, young Margaret absorbed a rich oral history of the Old South long before she could read. Her mother's activism in the women's suffrage movement also exposed her early to ideas of female independence and resilience, themes that would later surface in her portrayal of Scarlett O'Hara.
This upbringing in a city that had literally risen from the ashes—Atlanta having been burned during Sherman's March—gave Mitchell a personal and generational connection to the setting of Gone with the Wind. Her birth in the turn-of-the-century South positioned her uniquely to later chronicle, however romanticized, the mythology of the Confederacy and Reconstruction from a distinctly Southern, though modern, female perspective.