Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, one of the best-
selling novels of all time and the basis for a blockbuster
1939 movie, was published on June 30, 1936.

In 1926, Mitchell was forced to quit her job as a reporter
at the Atlanta Journal to recover from a series of physical
injuries. With too much time on her hands, Mitchell soon
grew restless. Working on a Remington typewriter, a gift
from her second husband, John R. Marsh, in their cramped 
one-bedroom apartment, Mitchell began telling the story
of an Atlanta belle named Pansy O’Hara.

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell
(November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949)

CAMILLE BOHANNON

On May 6, 1940, John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

The book traces the fictional Joad family of Oklahoma as they
lose their family farm and move to California in search of a
better life. 

One of Steinbeck’s most effective works of social commentary,
the novel also won the National Book Award.

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr.
(February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968)

Twenty-five-year-old Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and
the Dead, was published on May 4, 1948. The book is critically
acclaimed and widely considered one of the best novels to
come out of World War II.

Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923 – 20007)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
(3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973
    
    
    

English writer and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien was the author of
the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The great success of these two books led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly
identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more 
precisely, of high fantasy.