Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone With the Wind" because she was bored after a bad ankle injury ended her journalism career. After ten years of writing, she never intended her novel to be published. When a friend scoffed that Mitchell couldn't write a novel, in defiance, Mitchell sent it to an editor the next day before asking for the manuscript back the next day. Macmillan published the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937. Show less