Margaret Mitchell, except for a year of college in Massachusetts, spent her life in Atlanta. She was a sixth-generation Atlantan, daughter of a family prominent in society. Her father was a lawyer and her mother founder of the women's suffrage movement in Georgia. Mitchell was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and its Sunday Magazine. From her family and other acquaintances, she grew up hearing stories of the Civil War and its aftermath. While recovering from an ankle injury, she began to write her only book, which required 10 years for completion: Gone With the Wind. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize. The movie based on it won nine Academy Awards in 1939. Its hero and heroine, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, are two of the best-known characters in American fiction.