May 3, 1937 –
A short little southern lady wrote a novel for her own amusement, and with solid support from her husband, she kept her literary efforts a secret from all her friends. She would hide the voluminous pages under towels, disguising them as a divan, or hide pages in her closets or under her bed. She wrote in a haphazard fashion, writing the last chapter first, and skipping around from chapter to chapter.
In a nutshell, her novel was about a young woman who spend nearly 400 pages chasing after a man that she realizes in the end that she never really loved and (possibly) loses the man that she really does.
It was a great surprise to Ms. Mitchell that on June 30, 1936 when her voluminous novel was published. Even more shocking, on May 3, 1937, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind.
And so it goes
