"Gone with the Wind" tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, a young Southern woman living in the time of the Civil War, and later Reconstruction. It was published in 1936, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year. It was made into a movie in 1939 — when adjusted for inflation, it's still the highest-grossing movie of all time.
However, the book and the film haven't aged well, due to racist language, stereotypical characters, and its romanticization of the Antebellum South and slavery — Mitchell chose to ignore the horrors of slavery for her own narrative. In a 1936 interview, she said of her upbringing: "In fact, I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was 10 years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions."
Mitchell wrote the story while she was recovering from an ankle injury. She died in 1949, after getting struck by a drunk driver. In 1996, 47 years after her death, a manuscript was discovered. It was published as "Lost Laysen," a novella set in the South Pacific.
"Lost Laysen" was found handwritten in two notebooks by the son of one of Mitchell's ex-boyfriends, who discovered it while he was going through his father's correspondence with Mitchell — he had planned on donating the letters to a museum.