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This definitive biography of the author of "Gone With the Wind offers a perceptive psychological analysis of the novel and a concise study of the book's shifting critical fortunes in the contemporary South. The life of "Peggy" Mitchell, from her birth in the highest reaches of aristocratic Atlanta in 1900 to her death in 1949 in a car accident, is detailed in a manner that is sympathetic yet wholly objective. A fascinating mass of contradictions, Mitchell emerges here as alternately retiring and flirty, as a Southern belle confident enough to enter Atlanta's worst prisons and slums during her journalism career at the "Atlanta Journal, and as an intensely private person who nonetheless answered every fan letter herself. The breadth of this biography is vast, ranging from the intimate--including the astonishing real-life model for Rhett Butler--to the global--exploring the intense responses to the book from people all over the world who continue to see an image of their own political struggles in Mitchell's depiction of bravery in defense of a lost cause.