BIO: Headstrong, beautiful Margaret MITCHELL, born in Atlanta, GA in 1900, was a fifth-generation Atlantan, daughter of a prominent attorney and a suffragist, in a family that relished retelling stories of their ancestors' illustrious wartime experiences. She was to fall in love with Lieutenant Clifford HENRY, a Harvard man who would lose his life in France during WWI. Margaret enrolled at Smith College in 1918 and made her Atlanta debut two years later; for that occasion she chose to perform an Apache dance that caused somewhat of a scandal . Mitchell married Red Upshaw, divorcing him a year later and and landed a job with the "Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine," where she wrote under the name Peggy Mitchell. In 1925 she married John R. MARSH, an editor and writer, and one year later while recovering from an ankle injury, and with her husband's help and support, began writing a book of fiction that became "Gone With The Wind, " her novel about the Civil War primari! ly reflecting the view of the Confederacy and with the scene of much of the action being Atlanta. Margaret took the title of the book from a poem by the English poet Ernest DOWSON. Published in 1936, it sold a million copies within six months and won the Pulitzer prize a year later. By the time of her death more than eight million copies had been sold in 40 different countries.and translated into 20 languages as well as Braille. The 1939 film version of the book won the Academy Award and broke all attendance records. The character of Scarlett O'Hara's father was apparently modeled after Mitchell's own plantation-owning grandfather, Thomas FITZGERALD. Plucky, nose-thumbing Mitchell was plagued by arthritis which sometimes confined her to bed. She never wrote another novel and died in an automobile accident in 1949 (apparently hit by a cab while crossing an Atlanta street) having devoted the last decade to volunteer work, primarily in health and education. Sixty years after the film's Atlanta premiere, the "Gone With the Wind Museum opened across from her apartment house (which she affectionately referred to as "the dump") where she wrote much of her story on a Remington portable typewriter .