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Book Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Author: Margaret Mitchell

Publisher: Macmillan Inc.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

First Publication: 1936

Language: English

Major Characters: Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, Gerald O’Hara, Ellen O’Hara, Mammy, Frank Kennedy, Charles Hamilton

Setting Place: Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era

Theme: The Transformation of Southern Culture, Overcoming Adversity with Willpower, Survival

Book Summary: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War, Margaret Mitchell’s magnificent historical epic is an unforgettable tale of love and loss, of a nation mortally divided and a people forever changed. Above all, it is the story of beautiful, ruthless Scarlett O’Hara and the dashing soldier of fortune, Rhett Butler.

Margaret Mitchell’s monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 80 years after its initial publication, its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and the most beloved work by an American writer…

Despite boasts that Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is “the greatest romance of our time,” this approximately 1,000-page book is not just a romance. Its intense focus on a ruthless heroine neatly underscores what this brick of a book is instead: an exploration of transformation, loss, and the deep unfairness of life. Perhaps no story can do more justice to these themes–more memorably and, ultimately, devastatingly–than this, Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece.

There’s little happiness in Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, something that surprised me even though before beginning I was aware it’s a complex book. Neither heroine Scarlett O’Hara nor Rhett Butler are likable people; their relationship is an unhealthy one, with Butler abusing O’Hara after they marry. It’s the Civil War that hoards the spotlight. This war backdrop, as is true of all war backdrops , lends the story an important gravitas and drama; however, this same backdrop infuses Gone With the Wind with an undercurrent of hopelessness, and an all-encompassing hopelessness it is.

“Hardships make or break people.”

To say that everything hinges on the war backdrop wouldn’t be exaggerating; the war affects each character profoundly, providing the meaning behind their most significant actions. It’s the narrative’s very life force. Margaret Mitchell put a human face on this war that’s remarkable, and her gruesome (but not gratuitously so) descriptions strike all the right emotional chords at just the right intensity.

She impressively juxtaposed the war’s atrocities with Scarlett O’Hara’s superficial frets; this young woman shamelessly laments her lack of stylish dresses while just a few miles away men lie bleeding to death in cramped hospitals without benefit of painkillers. Scarlett O’Hara most certainly is a fearless woman with a strong independent streak, but she’s easy to despise. She’s not so unlikable though. This protagonist is utterly captivating, someone who held me spellbound, much as she does the many characters she manipulates.

“Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”

Gone With the Wind isn’t really about Scarlett O’Hara, though, as compelling as she is. The book’s power lies in part on Margaret Mitchell’s spin on the theme of transformation; Scarlett is merely the character she used to drive home that theme. In the world of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, not all personal transformations are for the better. Margaret Mitchell’s creation isn’t the syrupy maudlin type with inspirational characters turning over a new leaf by story’s end.

This isn’t to say that no one gets their comeuppance in due time or that no lessons are learned, but, like life itself, countless unfair events unfold. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell isn’t in the business of imparting happily-ever-afters. “The greatest romance of our time” is a surprisingly contemplative tale: real, deeply sad at times, and unafraid to reveal a great many of life’s uglier truths.

“After all, tomorrow is another day!”

Finally, I believe it’s worth mentioning that Gone With the Wind’s Southern sensibility is very strong. The South here is a living character all its own, and this vividness lends even deeper resonance to the story while breathing life into its large cast of characters. I know some have taken–and do take–issue with the Georgia of this era, when slavery and sexism were very much a reality; however, it’s always clear that Mitchell’s goal was only authenticity and accuracy in portrayal, and she wasn’t expressing personal sentiments. Her Pulitzer Prize is well deserved.

Controversy:

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has been banned on social grounds . The book has been called “offensive” and “vulgar” because of the language and characterizations. Words like “damn” and “whore” were scandalous at the time. Also, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice disapproved of Scarlett’s multiple marriages. The term used to describe slaves was also offensive to readers. In more recent times, the membership of lead characters in the Ku Klux Klan is also problematic.

The book joins the ranks of other books that controversially tackled issues of race, including Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of Narcissus, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Buy Now: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: Review, summary and analysis

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Book: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Wikipedia

Originally published: June 30, 1936
Author: Margaret Mitchell
Followed by: Rhett Butler's People
Genres: Novel, Historical Fiction, War story
Pages: 1037 (first edition); 1024 (Warner Books paperback)

About the Author: Margaret Mitchell

Excerpts from the original text: gone with the wind .

What I love is a fictional person of my own, a person who is lifeless like Mei Li. I made a beautiful dress and fell in love with it. When Asiri came over on horseback, he was so handsome and so different, so I just put on the clothes for him, whether it fits him or not. So I couldn't see his real appearance. In fact, what I have always loved is that suit, not him at all. —— Quoting from page 834

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1937 Pulitzer Prize Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

“…tomorrow is another day.”

In a rare interview with the Atlanta Journal in 1936, Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell described her debut (and only) novel, Gone With The Wind , as “…the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time.” While this is an accurate summary of the novel, this is quite a terse overview of the top bestseller of all time. Gone With The Wind is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, but it offers the revisionist mythology of the American South before, during, and after the Civil War, from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. While the prose in Gone With The Wind is gripping throughout the novel, no review of this novel would be complete without a swift condemnation of its inaccurate, disappointing, vulgar, and dehumanizing portrayal of black people in the novel. Throughout the book, African Americans are characterized as essentially one-dimensional simpletons who are incompetent, untrustworthy, ill-educated, child-like, bestial and in need of strong guidance from a genteel but domineering white aristocracy. Many black characters are compared to animals or children, with frequent references to “darkies” and “negroes.” This blatantly racist tone is pervasive throughout the novel and it casts a dark pall over an otherwise compelling tale of epic romance –albeit an extraordinarily dense work of commercial fiction (the original first edition of Gone With The Wind was published by MacMillan was 1,037 pages long).

Our central protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara, a frustratingly flighty, selfish, and spoiled Southern belle. She lives on her family’s vast North Georgia cotton plantation, and she comes of age right on the cusp of the Civil War, however she cares little for political affairs. Her days are spent in frivolity –fretting over dresses and parties, and toying with young men who might become potential suitors like the Tarleton twins. In these early passages in the novel, Mitchell provides a brief but telling summary of the antebellum South when describing Scarlett’s Irishman father, Gerald O’Hara:

“He liked the South, and he soon became, in his own opinion, a Southerner. There was much about the South – and Southerners – that he would never comprehend; but, with the whole-heartedness that was his nature, he adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them, for his own – poker and horse racing, red-hot politics and the code duello, States’ Rights and damnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and exaggerated courtesy to women. He even learned to chew tobacco. There was no need for him to acquire a good head for whiskey, he had been born with one” (62).

The Civil War is merely the setting of Gone With The Wind , but the central tension lies in Scarlett’s hidden love for her neighbor –a graceful, blonde, country gentleman named Ashley Wilkes who is betrothed to his shy but innocently lady-like cousin, Melanie. On the other hand, Scarlett is pursued by a curt and arrogant scallawag named Rhett Butler. While neither Ashley nor Rhett are particularly supportive of the war, Ashley is overwhelmed by a sense of patriotic duty to his home state when Georgia secedes from the Union. Rhett, on the other hand, is unimpressed by the foolhardy men of the South. However, Rhett is a reviled man for his blockade-running activities and for managing a seedy prostitution business. He maintains neutral commercial activities both North and South of the Mason-Dixon line throughout the war, while serving as the voice of reason in noting the impossibility of victory for the South due to an extensive network of Yankee resources, technology, manufacturing, and manpower –he characterizes the Confederacy’s call to war as Quixotic and naïve.

As the novel progresses, the war explodes with much excitement and enthusiasm in the South. Scarlett hurriedly marries a young suitor named Charles Hamilton in a foolish attempt to make Ashley jealous, but her new husband soon dies of a disease while en route to the front, leaving Scarlett pregnant and alone with a child. And despite her obligatory public displays of mourning, she moves to Atlanta and quickly begins attending parties and engaging in playful banter with the unscrupulous Rhett Butler while he is in town (much to the pearl-clutching chagrin of the ladies of Atlanta). She visits her Aunt’s home along with her sister-in-law Melanie (now pregnant with Ashley’s child), while helping tend to the wounded soldiers as a steady stream of Confederate soldiers continue to retreat and fall back to Atlanta. Just as Melanie goes into labor, the Union army begins to attack the city of Atlanta. In desperation, Scarlett serendipitously finds Rhett Butler who helps them escape the tumult while Atlanta is torched to the ground. The loss of Atlanta essentially spells the end for the Confederacy –a shock to many prideful Southerners.

In the second half of the novel, Scarlett quickly grows up and learns to fend for herself. She returns to her family’s plantation, Tara, and becomes a survivalist , caring and providing for a postpartum Melanie, along with her ill and depressed father who is saddened by the loss of his wife, as well as other members of the house –including a handful of former slaves who have chosen to remain at Tara. Together, they raise livestock, pick cotton, and grow vegetables to survive. Ever-present is the threat of Union soldiers or Sherman’s troops storming through their land. In these troublling scenes, Northern Yankees are portrayed as villainous, fearsome, greedy, and a-moral. At one point, Scarlett displays her own gumption by killing a stray Union soldier who enters her house under the auspices of robbing and raping the women inside. As the hero, Scarlett becomes the de facto leader of the household. Her strength gives Gone With The Wind a distinctly feminist narrative undertone as her strength proves to be the salvation of the people who surround her. However, as Reconstruction begins, the Radical Republicans take control of everything in Georgia and they begin to brutally punish former Confederate sympathizers with permanent indebtedness and prison, but for those who are not imprisoned, the punishment is disenfranchisement or a levying of exorbitant taxes. With little money to spare, Scarlett travels to Atlanta to beg Rhett Butler for financial assistance only to find that he too has been imprisoned. She offers herself as his mistress in exchange for money but an amused Rhett simply claims he has no access to his own money. Meanwhile, Ashley stumbles his way to Tara after surviving a Union prison camp. Now, with more mouths to feed, Scarlett grows desperate. By happenstance, she runs into an old acquaintance, Frank Kennedy, a gentleman from the antebellum days. Although he is betrothed to Scarlett’s neighbor, she quickly concocts a lie and marries Frank for his money anyway, an act which saves Tara but earns Scarlett the ire of her neighbors.

In order to secure herself a lasting income, Scarlett uses her husband’s money to build a lumber mill which quickly grows into a successful business in spite of Republican efforts to thwart any efforts of Southern enterprise. In these scenes, the entire social order of Georgia is cast aside as crime and lawlessness arises. However, Scarlett grows arrogant with her successful business and one night she rides through a notorious shantytown filled with vagrants where two men attempt to rob her, leading to the emergence of a new “vigilante” group to seek vengeance on the vagrants –it is the birth of the notorious Ku Klux Klan. In the ensuing chaos, Scarlett’s husband Frank Kennedy is killed but Rhett Butler saves Ashley Wilkes from imprisonment by providing a shady alibi –he claims the men were drinking all night at a local brothel (which, as it turns out, is owned by Rhett Butler). The story checks out and Ashley is allowed to recover from his wounds without further inquiry.

Almost immediately after Frank’s death, Rhett Butler proposes marriage to Scarlett and, in a heated passion, she agrees. They honeymoon in New Orleans while spending Rhett’s vast sums of money before returning to Atlanta –to Peachtree Street– where they build a house near Scarlett’s dwelling during the Union Army’s assault years earlier. In time, Scarlett gives birth to a baby girl, much to her chagrin, and Rhett nicknames the girl “bonnie” because of her blue eyes –an allusion to the “bonnie blue flag,” an early flag of the Confederacy. Rhett dotes upon bonnie day and night, and he proudly takes her on carriage rides around town. One day, Scarlett visits her lumber mill where Ashley is now employed and they reminisce about the old days before the war, but while caught up in nostalgia they are spotted together and the scene is mistaken for impropriety. It causes a great scandal amidst the gentry of Atlanta, and Rhett Butler grows furious. He drags Scarlett to a party in order to embarrass her, and in the evening (Mitchell suggests) Rhett sexually assaults his own wife. Perhaps it need not be said, but Gone With The Wind is filled with all manner of shameful acts that shocked early 20th century readers and continue to remain scandalous to this day. It’s engaging prose masks some deeply insidious themes that appeal to the worst impulses in American society. At any rate, Scarlett becomes pregnant with another child, but in a fight with Rhett she violently lunges at him and accidentally falls down a flight of stairs, breaking her ribs and causing a miscarriage.

With her life and reputation seemingly in tatters, Scarlett flees home to Tara to recuperate with her children:

“They left the village behind and turned into the red road to Tara. A faint pink still lingered about the edges of the sky and fat feathery clouds were tinged with gold and palest green. The stillness of the country twilight came down about them as calming as a prayer. How had she ever borne it, she thought, away for all these months, away from the fresh smell of country air, the plowed earth and the sweetness of summer nights? The moist red earth smelled so good, so familiar, so friendly, she wanted to get out and scoop up a handful. The honeysuckle which draped the gullied red sides of the road in tangled greenery was piercingly fragrant as always after the rain, the sweetest perfume. Above their heads a flock of chimney swallows whirled suddenly on swift wings and now and then a rabbit scurried startled on the road, his white tail bobbing like an eiderdown powder puff. She saw with pleasure that the cotton stood well, as they passed between plowed fields were the green bushes reared themselves sturdily out of the red earth. How beautiful all this was! The soft gray mist in the swampy bottoms, the red earth and growing cotton, the sloping fields with curving green rows and the black pines rising behind everything like sable walls. How had she ever stayed in Atlanta so long?” (645-646).

However, tragedy soon strikes again. Bonnie falls during a horse-jumping accident, much like her grandfather, and the fall tragically snaps her neck. Her death causes Rhett to tumble into a deep, alcoholic depression just as Melanie Wilkes becomes pregnant again, which forces her already frail body to grow deathly sick again. Scarlett speaks with Melanie just before her death. Scarlett also speaks with Ashley and she finally realizes that she does not love him anymore. Maybe she only ever loved the idea of Ashley –his sense of morality, propriety, dignity, and patriotism. In truth, Ashley is little more than an effeminate relic of the old Southern aristocracy –incapable of caring for himself or his own business interests, blinded by his own pride and stubbornness. Rhett Butler describes Ashley as follows:

“…Ashley Wilkes-bah! His breed is of no use or value in an upside-down world like ours. Whenever the world is up-ends, his kind is the first to perish. And why not? They don’t deserve to survive because they won’t fight – don’t know how to fight. This isn’t the first time the world’s been upside-down and it won’t be the last. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. And when it does happen everyone loses everything and everyone is equal.” (Rhett Butler defaming Ashley Wilkes to Scarlett pg 719) .

Scarlett runs to Rhett Butler in love and hope, finally realizing he is the only man she has ever truly loved, but her dreams are soon dashed as he apparently has already moved on, uttering the book’s most famous line:

“My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

The novel ends as Scarlett has finally overcome her girlish infatuation with Ashley Wilkes at long last, but despite retreating like a wilted flower in the face of Rhett’s rejection, Scarlett is filled with hope for the the future, of winning back the love of Rhett Butler …for “tomorrow is another day.”

The title of Gone With The Wind is derived from the third stanza of an 1894 poem by English writer, Ernest Dowson. It refers to a deep loss of love that will never be regained, while an age that is ‘gone with the wind’ in the novel refers to the old antebellum Southern aristocracy, an agrarian economy of gentlemen farmers, as well as a caste system predicated on abject human enslavement, as the wind that sweeps through Georgia decimates an entire way of life, and the soft romantic aristocrats of yesteryear are left behind while the hardened survivalists are the only people who endure.

Ironically, while on the surface Gone With The Wind presents readers with a potent cocktail of deep nostalgia for the false memory of the Antebellum South, the only characters who manage to survive this tempest that essentially destroys the Old South are those who actually look forward to a better future –not the reactionaries who look backward. In a unique twist, it is the self-seeking, ignoble, and unpatriotic people who are shown to be the truly impressive, enduring heroes while other meeker characters, who wistfully yearn for a return to the soft slave-owning aristocracy of antebellum, are shown to be undesirable. These gentler characters, like Ashley Wilkes, are cast to the wayside amidst Sherman’s infamous barn-burning march through Georgia, as farms, plantations, and railroads are all destroyed. In the novel, this unique historical moment of total war looms heavily over Southerners as Sherman’s troops eventually torch and loot the city of Atlanta –a key metropolitan junction for the Confederacy. Personally, I had never truly grasped the sheer tactical importance of the city of Atlanta prior to reading this novel, nor did I fully understand how small of a city Atlanta was at the time. As Mitchell conveys, much of the South was rural, pastoral, and agricultural with only a few towns and cities –Atlanta was an important city primarily because of its railroad intersection connecting Georgia to the ports of Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, and therefore it was a hub of communication and trade, as well as a gathering place to care for wounded soldiers.

At any rate, the central theme of the Gone With The Wind is survivalism . Which characters have the necessary gumption to endure and display the traits of leadership in times of extreme turmoil? Who are the characters that survive the aftermath of the Civil War? And why? Margaret Mitchell’s subtext in Gone With The Wind asks us to dismiss the soft, genteel Southern aristocrats like Ashley Wilkes, and instead look to the heroic independence of self-seeking survivalists like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.

As a final comment, in my own view, Gone With The Wind hardly rises above the rank of popular commercial fiction –it is a best-selling romance novel and represents a pop culture phenomenon, but it is not among the great works of American literature. The fact that it won a Pulitzer Prize is a shameful stain on the legacy of the Pulitzers. As one of Margaret Mitchell’s sources of inspiration for the novel, she apparently drew upon the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr., who was a key voice in the early 20th century resurgence of American white nationalism, the Ku Klux Klan, and re-writing the history of slavery as essentially an anodyne, orderly, pleasant way of life, or at least strongly preferable to the movement for abolitionism. Dixon’s works also inspired D.W. Griffith’s disgracefully racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) , the first big budget movie in the United States which also portrayed black people as bestial, child-like, untrustworthy, and immoral. And this vile, ugly mythology can also be found within the imperialist “White Man’s Burden” narrative as well as the preposterous “Lost Cause” revisionist narrative. Pandering politicians like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump have exploited these tall tales for their own benefit, and likewise supposedly contrarian, iconoclastic internet provocateurs have also perpetuated these stories in recent years. Thankfully in later decades, the Pulitzer Prize was able to more clearly distinguish itself from the clamor of popular opinion, and instead strive to pursue truly great literature. At least the inclusion of Gone With The Wind among the Pulitzer Prize-winners forces readers to engage in fearless conversation about the troubling historical narratives that some Americans have chosen to embrace as sacrosanct.

The 1937 Pulitzer Prize Decision

The selection of Gone With The Wind as a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 was understandably controversial. At the time, there was a growing chorus of accusations exposing the rampant racism throughout the novel, and the Pulitzer Prize decision was also criticized for caving to popular opinion in selecting a bestseller, or what literary critic W.J. Stuckey calls “the apotheosis of the super-popular.” Should the Pulitzer Prize be a mere recognition of commercial success? The Pulitzer has long been a delicate balancing act, swaying between commercial popularity and literary excellence. Notably, in 1937 the Pulitzer Jury chose to overlook William Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom! and John Dos Passos Big Money .

The 1937 Novel Jury was composed of the same three members for the eighth and final year in a row: Jefferson Fletcher, Robert Lovett, and Albert Paine (he died later that year in 1937). This trio would be the longest serving consecutive Novel Jury. Apparently, in 1937 they provided a list to the Pulitzer Advisory Board of the top 6 novels recommended for the award — Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Last Puritan by George Santayana, Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmond, The Three Bags by Roger Burlingame, Mountain Path by Harriette Simpson, and Yang and Yin by Alice Tisdale Hobart. There were four additional novels considered: In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, Green Margins by E.P. O’Donnell, Of Lena Geyer by Marcia Davenport, The Enchanted Journey by Robert Nathan. The two novels at the top of the list were Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan . They wrote to the Advisory Board in a report listing Gone With The Wind and The Last Puritan . The Pulitzer Advisory Board simply unilaterally selected Gone With The Wind .

Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times , it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic , served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.

Today (as recently as 2014) Americans continue to rank Gone With The Wind as among their favorite books, second only to The Bible. Nevertheless, controversies continue to plague the novel. Gone With The Wind has frequently found its way onto lists of banned books (remarkably the Nazis banned the book in Germany in the 1930s), and even as recently as 2020, an online video streaming service removed the 1939 classic film adaptation from their selection out of a fear of featuring racist content on their service ( Gone With The Wind was later re-added with a detailed introduction discussing its racist content). As with many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels on my list, reading Gone With The Wind has been strangely timely for me. Amidst continuing demands for a national conversation on race in America, following the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing “Black Lives Matter” protests and riots, reading Gone With The Wind serves as a difficult reminder of our nation’s unpleasant past.

According to former Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg, in 1937: “The Advisory Board, like the American public, wasted no time in embracing Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, the endearing figures in the most popular and enduring of all Civil War romances. As usual, the critical buffeting of Gone With The Wind as a best-selling Pulitzer selection was strong and merciless but this time the hard-pressed Advisory Board was proved right. For with the passage of time, Margaret Mitchell’s story became a part of American folklore –a novel that was read by millions of people inside and outside the country, a movie that was shown and reshown, and shown on television to a new generation, even a musical drama that originated in Japan with an all-Japanese cast singing a score by the American composer, Harold Rome. Whatever the critics may have thought of the book’s sentiment and magnolia-scented romance, the public loved it and still does. Gone With The Wind was an eminently defensible choice.”

Who Is Margaret Mitchell?

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was raised among the traditions and mythology of the old South. She grew up hearing fabled stories of the time before the war, as well as the difficult days of Reconstruction. Her father, Eugene Mitchell, was an attorney and historian of the Civil War, particularly with regard to Georgia. In one of the few interviews she gave, Margaret Mitchell recalled that her father could recite every single battle of the Atlanta campaign, the names of the commanding officers, and even if they were shot and where. Her mother and brother were also amateur Civil War historians.

Mitchell briefly attended Smith College for what she later described as a miserable period of her life (at one point she refused to attend a class because a black student was also in attendance), but when her stern, disciplinarian mother died she returned home and never finished college. She surprisingly married a scoundrel named Berrien Kinnard Upshaw (or simply “Red”) and since he did not have a job, the newly married couple moved in with Mitchell’s disapproving father but he turned out to be an abusive man who eventually abandoned her. Mitchell divorced him after two years of marriage (he later died falling off the second floor of a flop-house). In 1922, at the age of twenty-two, Mitchell began working as a writer for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine (she was one of the first female reporters in the state of Georgia). A few years later she married John R. Marsh and left her job due to recurring injuries, including an ankle injury. Bored and restless, she began writing her epic, Gone With The Wind . Her writing style was haphazard –she typed some pages here and there while scribbling down others on handwritten notes, and various editions and pages were hidden around her house. Only a few close friends of Mitchell’s actually knew about the book. For nine years Mitchell continued writing and re-writing the manuscript.

One day, a publishing agent named Harold Latham from the MacMillan Company was touring through the South hunting for new literary talent. A friend referred Mitchell, and the rest is history. After a few months of editing and changes, Gone With The Wind went on sale on June 30, 1936 and it quickly became a national phenomenon –a pleasantly surprising situation for everyone involved. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 amidst both celebration and controversy. Apparently, when Margaret Mitchell received her congratulatory phone call for the Pulitzer Prize, she simply continued with her evening routine, which included attending service at a black church. The press hunted for her all over Atlanta but they never did find her.

She was often asked if she would ever write another book, but Mitchell always responded that she was far too busy being the full-time author of Gone With The Wind to find the time to write anything else. She was paid $50,000 for the rights to the film by David O. Selznick –a massive sum in those days– and the incredible technicolor film later won Best Picture in 1939 ( read my review of the film here ). Margaret Mitchell attended the premiere for the film at the Loew’s Theatre in Atlanta, alongside the mayor of Atlanta, Producer David Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and a cohort of surviving Confederate Civil War veterans. The whole city was filled with cheering crowds and parties honoring the old South.

In the wake of persistent accusations of racism in her writings, in the 1990s it was later revealed that Margaret Mitchell had been anonymously funding the education of many Black/African-American medical students to attend Morehouse College throughout her lifetime. In fact, she risked her life to do so. In addition, she was outspoken about the plight of women in America –she was a flapper girl and a debutante in her 20s, as well as a tomboy. Her mother was an early suffragette. As with most writers, a greater degree of complexity lurks just beneath the surface and this axiom holds true for the enigmatic and reclusive Margaret Mitchell.

In 1949, while en route to see a movie with her husband on Peachtree Street in Atlanta –a street that ironically plays an important role in Gone With The Wind — Margaret Mitchell was struck and killed by an off duty cab driver. She was only 48 years old. Gone With The Wind was the only novel she ever published in her lifetime. She never had any children,

Years later, another short romantic novella surfaced that she wrote in her teenage years and it was eventually posthumously published and entitled Lost Laysen . In 1991, a sequel to Gone With The Wind authorized by the Mitchell estate was published entitled Scarlett (1991) by Alexandra Ripley –it was a bestseller, but was lambasted by critics. The same could be said of other authorized prequels, sequels, and re-imaginings of the Gone With The Wind narrative, such as Rhett Butler’s People (2007) by Donald McCaig (which was also authorized by the Mitchell estate).

In 2011, Mitchell’s nephew Joseph Mitchell passed away. He left fifty percent of trademark and literary rights of the Margaret Mitchell Estate, as well as some personal belongings of his aunt’s, to the Archdiocese of Atlanta.

Film Adaptation :

Director: Victor Fleming
Starring: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland

Literary Context in 1936-1937:

Nobel Prize for Literature (1937): awarded to French novelist Roger Martin du Gard “for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life in his novel cycle Les Thibault.”
Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestseller in 1936 was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Other notable bestsellers that year included: The Last Puritan by George Santayana, Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.
Jewish booksellers throughout Nazi Germany were deprived of their Reich Publications Chamber membership cards, preventing them from selling books.
The Greek poet and Communist activist Yiannis Ritsos was inspired to write his poem Epitaphios by a photograph of a dead protester at a massive tobacco workers’ demonstration in Thessaloniki. When it was published, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power in Greece and copies were burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens.
The 38-year-old Spanish dramatist, Federico García Lorca, was arrested by Francoist militia during the White Terror and was never seen alive again. His brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, the leftist mayor of Granada, was shot on the same day.
The Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s literature is inaugurated by the Library Association in the United Kingdom.
The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos was published.
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain was published.
Agatha Christie published three Poirot novels: The A. B. C. Murders, Cards on the Table, and Murder in Mesopotamia.
The Big Money by John Dos Passos was published.
Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier was published.
Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds was published.
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner was published.
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck was published.

Did The Right Book Win?

Not unlike The Good Earth before it, Gone with the Wind as a winner of the Pulitzer Prize represents more of an acknowledgement of a widespread cultural phenomenon, rather than a true honor for literary excellence. While Gone with the Wind is an undeniably well-crafted novel, its plain thematic nostalgia for a supposedly carefree, peaceful antebellum age of plantation slavery is deeply troubling. For those willing to read between the lines, Margaret Mitchell has actually buried a subtle critique of the fabled “Southern Gentleman” in here, instead praising the survivalist characters who possess true “gumption,” rather than the soft-minded aristocrats. At any rate, Gone with the Wind is an important book, but not one I would rank highly in the American canon, its subject matter being a favorite of despicably racist organizations to this very day. Another possible novel I would have considered for the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 would have been Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, though in hindsight, it’s hard to image the Pulitzer Prize choosing anything other than Gone with the Wind .

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With The Wind . Scribner, New York, New York, 1996.

GONE WITH THE WIND

by Margaret Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 1936

Don't sell this as primarily a novel of the Civil War. Sell it rather as a novel in human emotions against the background of the Civil War and its aftermath. It has the finer qualities of So Red The Rose , — the authentic picture of people and places and incidents, something of the moonlight and honeysuckle of the glamorous Old South, much of the traditions and manner of life and thought. It has too great length — the author will learn with experience the valuable and essential lesson of selection. But, from the point of view of story and characterization, I found it more absorbing reading, more vital characterization than the Stark Young book. Instead of taking form as a succession of pictures from a family album, the characters come to life with the impact of life upon them, and their impact, one upon the other. The central figure is a girl, spoiled, selfish, dominating, wilful, magnetic, — you hate her, you long to throttle her — but you can't help acknowledging her fascination and admiring her spirit. An opportunist, yes, but she pays the price. The author comes from the state of which she writes — Georgia — and she knows her background thoroughly. She can write.

Pub Date: June 30, 1936

ISBN: 1416548890

Page Count: 33

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1936

HISTORICAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

UK Edition of ‘Gone With the Wind’ Adds Warning

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

Awards & Accolades

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

New York Times Bestseller

by Yaa Gyasi ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016

A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.

A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.

Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.

Pub Date: June 7, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Yaa Gyasi

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The Literary Edit

Review: Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

How wrong I was. And how I shall ever be indebted to Lesley for lending it to me. It was perhaps a hundred or so pages into Gone With The Wind that I really fell for this epic tale; and from then on in, I never wanted it to end.

Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, the hero and heroine of the book are so full of life and their complex relationship is without question the single favourite I have ever come across in the many hundreds of books I have read. My boyfriend at the time paled in comparison to Rhett Butler, whose wit and charm had me, quite literally, swooning.

And alongside this epic romance is a very real war and an intense plot that deals with death, racial discrimination, and triumph over adversity. Gone With The Wind literally took my breath away (no pun intended) and it is, without question, my very favourite book of all time.

About Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County, Georgia, and Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman’s March to the Sea. A historical novel, the story is a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the onset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

About Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, popularly known as Margaret Mitchell, was an American author, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her novel, Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 28 million copies. An American film adaptation, released in 1939, became the highest-grossing film in the history of Hollywood, and received a record-breaking number of Academy Awards.

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4 comments on “Review: Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell”

GWTW is my favorite too. Margaret Mitchell is incredibly interesting. I’m doing a project right now to read through everything she wrote that’s in print, biographies, her novella, etc. And I’ll probably reread Gone With the Wind for the fourth time.

If you’re ever interested in a biography, I strongly recommend Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind by Marianne Walker.

If you’re at all curious here’s a post about a recent visit I made to the Margaret Mitchell House (where she wrote Gone With the Wind ). You can find a link to my Margaret Mitchell project on my about page, with links to books about her.

Cheers! Love your blog!! Excellent goals.

I’m also reading through the classics. 😀

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: Book Review

I have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop.org and Malaprop's Bookstore in beautiful Asheville, NC. I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase merchandise through links on my site. Read more on my affiliate page .

Cover of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

This sweeping epic portrays life during the Civil War and Reconstruction through the eyes of Scarlett O’Hara, a young Southern belle who has a stubborn streak a mile wide. She’s in love with the wrong man, marries the wrong men, and is irredeemably selfish, but she’s a survivor. Through it all, she steadfastly refuses the advances of reprobate blockade runner Rhett Butler. Their story is as timeless as it is turbulent.

I feel like the last Southern woman to read Gone With the Wind . My excuse, such as it is: I did try to read it once before, when I was way too young. I thought Scarlett was mean, Miss Melly was a wimp, and Ashley was just useless. I put it down very early on and never wanted to pick it up again. However, as the host of The Southern Literature Reading Challenge , people were shocked that I’d never read this Southern classic, my aunt perhaps most of all. She has read it multiple times and re-watches the movie religiously. She finally told me last year when we were at the Decatur Book Festival together, “How about we do a read-a-long? It’s been years since I re-read it and I would love to get your reactions as you’re reading it for the first time.” With her shove support, I finally got up the nerve to tackle this beast.

I loved it. I have an ancient old mass market paperback with the tiniest font known to man and I still plowed through. My eyes physically hurt from the strain of reading almost 1000 pages of “ant prints” as I call fonts that small, and I still could not put it down.

These characters just came to life for me. Don’t ask me if I hated them or loved them because I still couldn’t tell you and it’s been over 6 months since I finished it. Rhett–I eventually loved him, even though there were times I wanted to smack that smirk off his face. Ashley–I didn’t respect him at all. He was a weak excuse of a man. Melanie–I thought she was weak and silly at first, but she’s probably the strongest character in the book in a lot of ways. She surprised me. Just when I wrote her off as hopeless, she would do something to make me change my mind. Scarlett–I was all over the place. I loathed her, I respected her. She was selfish, she was a survivor. She’s a bitch, she’s a forerunner of the women’s movement. She is complicated. That’s all I know for sure.

I have seen enough of the movie in the past to have a very good idea about the story. I was surprised when these extra kids and marriages suddenly showed up in Scarlett’s life. Holy cow, she was a busy woman. Maybe I missed something, but I think they cleaned her up just a little for the movie.

Grab a copy with a readable font (I do not recommend reading until your eyes hurt), and give this a try. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the epic story you’ll find within.

Banned: I’m having trouble tracking down exactly why Gone With the Wind has been banned or challenged. I’m finding brief references to racism, Scarlett’s behavior, and offensive language. It definitely had some scenes racist scenes that made me uncomfortable, there’s no denying that. But how can you write a book about this period and place in history, keep it historically accurate, and avoid the racist attitudes? You can’t. I’m not excusing the behavior, but there’s no changing history, much as we would like to. Instead, we must remember our history to guard from going down the dark paths again. Scarlett is a strong, single-minded woman, and we all know how that tends to go over with society in general. Heaven forbid a woman should have a mind of her own. The language? Other than the racist stuff, it’s nothing that most of us would even raise an eyebrow at today.

Read an excerpt .

Read more reviews at A Literary Odyssey , A Room of One’s Own , and Age 30+ … A Lifetime of Books .

If you liked Gone With the Wind , you might also like Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Buy Gone With the Wind at

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of the American Library Association.

I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop’s , my local independent bookstore located in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books . I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.

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But how can you write a book about this period and place in history, keep it historically accurate, and avoid the racist attitudes? You can't. <~~ Exactly!

Great review! I love this book, I recently re-read it myself.

As many times as I've watched the movie, I can't believe I still haven't read the book! I'm going to have to search the library for a large print copy 😉

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Plot and Main Characters of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind"

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M.A., English Literature, California State University - Sacramento
B.A., English, California State University - Sacramento

Gone With the Wind is the famous and controversial American novel by American writer, Margaret Mitchell. Here, she draws us into the lives and experiences of myriad colorful characters during (and after) the Civil War . Like William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , Mitchell paints a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers, torn apart and brought back together--through the tragedies and comedies of human existence.

Gone With the Wind

Author : Margaret Mitchell
Genre : Romance novel; historical fiction
Setting : 1861–1870s; Atlanta and Tara, Scarlett's family plantation
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin
Publication Date : 1936
Narrator : anonymous
Main Characters: Rhett Butler, Frank Kennedy, Sarah Jane “Pittypat” Hamilton, Scarlett O’Hara, Ashley Wilkes, Melanie Wilkes
Known As : A bestselling American love story that chronicled the time during and after the Civil War and inspired the Academy Award Winning movie of the same name starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable

Margaret Mitchell wrote, "If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't."

The title of the novel is taken from Ernest Dowson's poem, "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." The poem includes the line: "I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind."

Plot Summary

The story begins at the O’Hara family cotton plantation Tara, in Georgia, as the Civil War approaches. Scarlett O’Hara’s husband dies while serving in the Confederate Army, leaving her a widow and their baby without a father.

Melanie, Scarlett’s sister-in-law and the wife of Ashley Wilkes (the neighbor Scarlett actually loves), convinces Scarlett to grieve her dead husband at the Atlanta home of Melanie’s aunt, Pittypat. The arrival of Union forces traps Scarlett in Atlanta, where she becomes acquainted with Rhett Butler. As Sherman’s army burns Atlanta to the ground, Scarlett convinces Rhett to save them by stealing a horse and carriage that will take her and her child back to Tara.

Although many neighboring plantations have been destroyed altogether during the war, Tara has not escaped the war’s ravages, either, leaving Scarlett ill-equipped to pay the higher taxes imposed upon the plantation by the victorious Union forces.

Returning to Atlanta to try to raise the money she needs, Scarlett is reunited with Rhett, whose attraction to her continues, but he is unable to help her financially. Desperate for money, Scarlett tricks her sister’s fiance, Atlanta businessman Frank Kennedy, into marrying her instead.

Insisting on pursuing her business deals instead of staying home to raise their children, Scarlett finds herself accosted in a dangerous part of Atlanta. Frank and Ashley seek to avenge her, but Frank dies in the attempt and it takes Rhett’s timely intervention to save the day.

Widowed again, but still in love with Ashley, Scarlett marries Rhett and they have a daughter. But after their daughter’s death—and Scarlett’s attempts to recreate pre-war southern society around her, with Rhett’s money—she realizes it’s not Ashley but Rhett she loves.

By then, however, it’s far too late. Rhett’s love for her has died.

A Summary of the Main Characters

Rhett Butler: Businessman and rogue who falls for Scarlett, admiring both her feminine and financial wiles.
Frank Kennedy: Atlanta storeowner, engaged to Scarlett’s sister for many years.
Sarah Jane “Pittypat” Hamilton: Melanie’s aunt in Atlanta.
Scarlett O’Hara: Gone with the Wind ’s protagonist, the eldest of three sisters, who clings to her past life as a southern belle in the antebellum South; cunning, ambitious and deceitful even to herself.
Ashley Wilkes: Scarlett’s neighbor and the man Scarlett thinks she loves; married to Scarlett’s sister-in-law.
Melanie Wilkes: The sister of Scarlett’s first husband and the wife of the man Scarlett believes she loves.

Controversy

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind has been banned on social grounds. The book has been called "offensive" and "vulgar" because of the language and characterizations. Words like "damn" and "whore" were scandalous at the time. Also, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice disapproved of Scarlett's multiple marriages. The term used to describe enslaved people was also offensive to readers. In more recent times, the membership of lead characters in the Ku Klux Klan is also problematic.

The book joins the ranks of other books that controversially tackled issues of race, including Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of Narcissus , Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird , Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

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Gone with the Wind

By margaret mitchell.

'Gone with the Wind' follows Scarlett O'Hara and how her decisions were informed by her circumstances. From marrying to spite a lost love, to venturing into unconventional businesses to escape poverty and starvation. It is an interesting story of individual and collective struggles for survival.

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

Gone with the Wind is a historical fiction set in the American Civil war and has served as a reference point for many discussions on war, slavery, race, adaptation for survival, and values. Scarlett O’Hara is at the center of the story, a spoilt, rash teenager who is suddenly forced to face marriage, parenthood, widowhood, starvation, and poverty in quick succession and decides to do everything in her powers to find security from these struggles.

Gone with the Wind Spoiler Free Plot Summary

Scarlett O’Hara is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, she is the eldest of the three daughters of Gerald and Ellen O’Hara and is considered the belle of the county. All the eligible young men in her county are wrapped in her charms and she relishes the attention they shower on her. Despite having all the county boys wrapped around her fingers, Ashley Wilkes is the only young man in the county she is in love with, he has never professed love to her but she believes he secretly reciprocates her love because he is always courteous to her.

She becomes shocked when she hears that Ashley will soon announce his engagement to another girl, Melanie Wilkes, at a barbecue party the following day.

In her despair, she confides in her father who confirms the news of Ashley’s engagement but tells her that it is for the best because Ashley is not her type and can never make her happy. But she does not listen. She comforts herself with the thought that Melanie is not physically attractive and so, it would be easy to get Ashley to leave Melanie once she, Scarlett professes her love to him.

At the party, she charms and enchants all the boys present to make Ashley jealous but Ashley seems too engrossed with his conversation with Melanie to notice. Eventually, she finds Ashley alone and drags him to an empty study room where she professes her love to him and begs him to elope with her. Ashley does not give in and tells her he will go ahead and marry Melanie before he leaves the room.

Thinking she is alone, she throws a china piece against the fireplace in anger only to realize Rhett Butler, a stranger she had just met at the party and was told he is a scandalous rogue, had been lying quietly by the fireplace and had overheard her conversation with Ashley. However, Rhett promises her that her secret is safe with him and leaves.

Without thinking, she agrees to marry Charles Hamilton, Melanie’s brother to spite Ashley and everyone that was talking about her flirtatious behavior with men at the party. And this makes Scarlett and Melanie become sisters-in-law.

Scarlett’s marriage to Charles Hamilton is very short-lived because of the war. Charles departs to enlist in the army just two weeks after their wedding and dies two months later. Scarlett gives birth to a baby boy but has no interest in the baby, she spends her time feeling depressed and obsessing over Ashley who has also departed for war. Not knowing the cause of her moody state, Scarlett’s parents send her to Atlanta to live with Melanie and her aunt in a bid to cheer her up.

Scarlett resents Melanie for marrying Ashley Wilkes but has to keep it a secret and live with her because they are now related by marriage. Only Rhett Butler who comes in and out of Scarlett’s life knows Scarlett’s true feelings. Melanie on her part is a sweet person and shows Scarlett nothing but pure love and devotion. As both women struggle through the war together, Scarlett eventually learns that it is impossible not to admire and even love the pure spirit of Melanie.

Gone with the Wind Summary

Warning: This Summary contains Spoilers

Scarlett O’Hara is spending the afternoon in her country home with two handsome twins from the neighboring plantation Stuart and Brent Tarleton who are both enamored with her. The twins tell her about their latest expulsion from school and mention that going to school would be useless anyway because a war is coming. Scarlett does not believe the war will take place and dismisses the subject.

As a change of subject, the twins mention that they heard the news of Ashley Wilkes’s engagement to his cousin Melanie Wilkes which would be announced at a Barbecue party the following day. The news shocks Scarlett because she is in love with Ashley and thinks he is in love with her as well. She runs out of the house to await her father’s return in order to have a private discussion with him. When her father eventually returns and meets her, he confirms the news of Ashley’s engagement and upon sensing Scarlett’s heartbreak, tells her that Ashley is not good for her and promises to hand over their home called Tara to her.

Scarlett does not heed her father’s advice and concludes Ashley would elope with her once she professes her love to him at the barbecue party. At the party, she eventually talks to Ashley alone and professes her love to him but Ashley turns her down and insists he must marry Melanie. When Ashley leaves, she throws a temper tantrum and realizes Rhett Butler, a stranger with a bad reputation she had just met at the party, had overheard her conversation with Ashley but Rhett Butler promises to keep her secret.

Scarlett tries to quietly sneak back to the room where she was meant to nap with the other girls but overhears Honey Wilkes talking about how Scarlett throws herself at men. In anger, she storms out, thinking of a way to get back at everyone that has offended her in the county. Charles Hamilton a shy boy she was flirting with at the party, meets her in this state and without knowing what is wrong with her, asks her to marry him and because Charles Hamilton was expected to marry Honey Wilkes, Scarlett agrees to marry him as a way to get back at Honey.

Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton but he leaves to join the army just after two weeks and a report of his death comes after two months, leaving Scarlett a pregnant widow. Meanwhile, Ashley goes ahead to marry Melanie and also leaves to join the army.

Scarlett gives birth to a baby boy for late Charles after some months and they name him Wade Hampton. But she finds herself always feeling unhappy. Her parents sense she is unhappy and send her to Atlanta to live with her sister-in-law, Melanie, and their Aunt Pittypat as a way to cheer her up.

Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with Melanie and Aunt Pittypat. The bubble of the city cheers her up. Although the war has started, Atlanta is still safe and the war has not gotten to the city. Scarlett joins the social circle of Atlanta elite women in volunteer services for the Confederate soldiers. She is upset about the restrictions placed on her because of her widowhood. She attends a fundraising party in Atlanta and yearns to dance but is not bold enough to dance because widows are expected to desist from any public display of merriment. However, Rhett Butler comes to the party and asks her for the dance and she agrees.

While they dance, they catch up on old times and Scarlett learns that Rhett was making a fortune as a blockade runner. he tells her he thinks the war has no justification and that The South would lose the war. He also tells her he dislikes the demure dressing expected of her as a widow and promises to get her colorful dresses the next time he visits Atlanta. Dr. Meade announces that men would bid for a dance with the lady of their choice with money as a way to raise funds for the Confederacy and Rhett bids the highest amount of money to dance with Scarlett and this brings them the disapproval of the matrons of Atlanta.

Rhett Butler begins visiting Aunt Pittypat’s house often, he brings gifts for Aunt Pittypat, plays fondly with Scarlett’s son Wade and has long conversations with Scarlett whenever he is in Atlanta.

A few days to Christmas, Ashley gets a furlough from the army and visits the ladies in Aunt Pittypat’s home. The war has made him sober and melancholic but Scarlett still fancies herself in love with him. On the day Ashley is to return to the army Scarlett professes her love to Ashley again. Ashley tells Scarlett he loves her too but pleads with her to promise to take care of Melanie and Scarlett makes the promise before he leaves.

Shortly after Ashley leaves, Melanie announces that she is pregnant. The war comes closer to Atlanta and Scarlett longs to return to the safety of her country home, Tara but her promise to take care of Melanie and her mother’s letter informing her of a disease outbreak in Tara makes her stay back in Atlanta. News of Confederate soldiers reaches Atlanta and Ashley is declared missing, Scarlett also finds that many of her childhood friends and beaus have died in battle. Rhett promises Melanie that he would pull some strings to find out more about Ashley’s whereabouts and later relays to them that Ashley has been captured as a prisoner by the Union Army.

The war gets closer to Atlanta and Aunt Pittypat flees to Macon for safety, leaving Scarlett with Melanie whose pregnancy is almost due. Dr. Meade warns that Melanie is not fit to travel and would need special medical attention during her delivery. With the influx of injured soldiers that overpower the hospitals and the medics, Scarlett begins to worry about Melanie’s childbirth but her slave, Prissy assures her that she knows a lot about midwifery and this calms Scarlett’s anxieties.

Melanie goes into labor on the day war comes into Atlanta. Scarlett tries to fetch a doctor to help but the doctors are overwhelmed with treating injured soldiers and cannot spare the time to come; all of their neighbors have fled for safety and no one is around to help, then Prissy at this point confesses that she had been lying about knowing how to be a midwife and Scarlett is forced to handle Melanie’s childbirth alone.

Eventually, Melanie delivers a baby boy safely but they are forced to flee Atlanta before she can regain her strength because the city is burning. Scarlett sends Prissy to fetch Rhett to assist them in fleeing. Rhett steals a scrawny-looking horse and comes to help them flee Scarlett, Melanie, Prissy, Wade, and Melanie’s newborn baby flee Atlanta.

At the outskirts of Atlanta, Rhett changes his mind and tells Scarlett he is leaving them to join the army. Scarlett is furious with him but Rhett does not change his mind, he gives her a passionate kiss, and tells her he loves her. Scarlett tells Rhett she wishes him dead for deserting them and continues on her journey to Tara while Rhett runs off into the burning city.

The journey to Tara is very wearisome for Scarlett– Melanie is unconscious, the newborn baby is weak, Prissy and Wade are frightened and everyone is thirsty and hungry– but she comforts herself with the hope of meeting her mother Ellen. As she rides into Clayton County, Scarlett finds many of the homes and plantations she knew from childhood in ruins and it makes her wonder if her home Tara is in ruins as well.

When they eventually reach their plantation, Scarlett is relieved that their home Tara is still standing but the situation in Tara is not what she had hoped for–her mother is dead, her two sisters are very sick, her father is losing his mind to grief and all their slaves have left except Mammy, Pork and Dilcey.

Dilcey has a newborn baby and because Melanie has no breast milk, Dilcey nurses her baby and Melanie’s baby on her own breasts.

Scarlett takes up the responsibility of running the household, assigning work, and giving instructions to everyone in the household. Soon, things begin to stabilize and they can pull meager meals together for the household. Then one day a lone Yankee thief comes to rob Tara but Scarlett kills him, Melanie comes out and finds out, together they search the dead thief and take all the valuables in his possession, Melanie urges Scarlett to hurry and bury the thief while she cleans up the bloodstains before anyone finds out.

Uncle Peter visits Tara with a letter from Ashley saying he is alive and they all begin to expect his return. Meanwhile, an injured soldier is brought to Tara and they nurse him back to health, they find out his name is Will Benteen and with time, he begins to assist Scarlett with work and in running the household.

Eventually, Ashley returns to Tara from being a war prisoner and it is an emotional moment for everyone in the household, especially Melanie and Scarlett.

The war is over and the state is in the control of a new government. Scarlett and Will Benteen have worked hard and Tara is among the more fortunate surviving plantations in Clayton County. Jonas Wilkerson, a former plantation overseer at Tara who was dismissed for getting a girl pregnant out of wedlock, is now at the helm of affairs in government and he connives to impose an exorbitant tax on Tara in a bid to render the O’Hara’s bankrupt and acquire the plantation for himself.

Scarlett is determined not to lose Tara and travels to Atlanta with hopes of manipulating Rhett Butler into giving her money for the taxes. She gets to Atlanta and discovers Rhett is in prison awaiting a murder trial. She puts on a facade of prosperity and visits him in prison, she tries to seduce him in exchange for the money but Rhett sees through her facade after almost falling for it. He tells her he cannot help her because his money is at risk of being confiscated by the government if it is discovered.

Scarlett leaves the prison in despair at the thought of losing Tara. She runs into Frank Kennedy, a man that has indicated an interest in marrying her sister Suellen and upon realizing he is wealthy, she lies to him that Suellen has gotten engaged to another man. Scarlett seduces him and manipulates him into marrying her within a short time. From him, she gets the money to pay the tax and secure Tara.

While married to Frank Kennedy, Scarlett begins to look into his business and realizes his business is not well managed. Frank Kennedy is displeased that Scarlett is business inclined but Scarlett easily bullies him and gets her way. Frank Kennedy mentions his plans to acquire a sawmill but complains that his debtors are not paying up.

Scarlett runs into Rhett again, he has been acquitted of the charges against him and is free. They have a conversation and Scarlett asks him for a loan to start a business of her own and Rhett Butler gives her the loan. With the loan, Scarlett acquires the sawmill herself and makes a profitable business out of it to the dismay of her husband and society.

The news of Gerald O’Hara’s death reaches Scarlett and she travels to Tara from Atlanta. Will Benteen brings Scarlett up to speed on the things going on in Tara as he picks her up from the station. Will wants to marry Suellen, Careen wants to join a convent, and the entire county blames Suellen for her father’s death.

After Gerald O’Hara’s funeral, Ashley tells Scarlett of his plans to leave Tara and travel to New York with Melanie and their baby. Scarlett does not want Ashley to be far from her so she offers to employ him to manage one of her sawmills in Atlanta, and when he refuses her offer, she manipulates Melanie into persuading Ashley to take it and Ashley gives in.

Melanie and Ashley return to Atlanta and get a small house of their own. Soon Melanie becomes the heart of Atlanta society because she is loved by everyone and volunteers for all the associations Atlanta finds respectable.

Scarlett on the other hand continues to face the disapproval of Atlanta by her ruthless business ethics and the way she flouts conventions. She discovers that she is pregnant and her husband Frank is relieved, hoping that the pregnancy will divert her interest in the business. However, she continues to run her business until far into her pregnancy. She gives birth to a baby girl and they name her Ella.

Shortly after the childbirth, Scarlett returns to managing her businesses to her husband’s utter dismay. Uncle Peter would ride her around but after an encounter where some Yankee women insult and belittle Uncle Peter, he stops riding Scarlett around because he was hurt that Scarlett did not stand up for him. Melanie asks Archie, one of the strangers she hosts in her cellar to drive Scarlett around and he agrees. Archie is mysterious and taciturn but is dependable enough to keep Scarlett safe. However, Archie stops driving Scarlett around when she begins to use the labor of convicts to work in her sawmills.

Scarlett resorts to riding alone to her sawmills amidst the security tensions in Atlanta. One on occasion as she leaves her sawmill, she is attacked by two criminals from Shantytown but Big Sam, their former slave at Tara rescues her.

Frank Kennedy, Ashley Wilkes, Dr. Meade, and many other men of Atlanta who are members of the Ku Klux Klan plot an attack on Shantytown in retaliation for the attack on Scarlett. Rhett gets information that the Yankee officers have set a trap for whoever would attempt to attack Shantytown that night and rushes to warn Ashley and Frank but they are already at the Ku Klux Klan meeting and he meets Melanie and Scarlett instead.

Frank Kennedy and Tommy Wellburn are already shot dead in the attacks but Rhett does his best to manipulate evidence and plot an alibi to save Ashley Wilkes and the other members of the Ku Klux Klan from being convicted. The alibi involves Belle Watling, a known prostitute in Atlanta testifying that all the men had been in her salon with her girls on the night of the attack. It was an alibi the elites of Atlanta found very scandalous but they grudgingly accepted it to escape death by hanging.

After the case is resolved, Rhett Butler proposes marriage to Scarlett who is widowed for the second time and she agrees to marry him.

Rhett and Scarlett get married and make indulgent trips for their honeymoon. Rhett is rich and indulges Scarlett’s whims which involves building a gigantic house with ostentatious furnishing because Scarlett is determined to be the envy of the people of Atlanta who treated her with contempt. But the people of Atlanta continue to snub her despite her wealth and only Melanie truly stands by her.

Scarlett gets pregnant the third time with Rhett’s child and gives birth to a baby girl. They give the baby girl a nickname, Bonnie. Scarlett tells Rhett that they are not to have sexual relations again because she does not want more children, Rhett agrees and they move into separate bedrooms.

Bonnie grows into a spoiled little girl who Rhett loves and showers with devotion. Rhett takes Bonnie everywhere he goes and the people of Atlanta see them as an adorable pair.

Melanie plans a surprise birthday for Ashley and asks Scarlett to stall him at the sawmill so that they can finish preparations. Scarlett and Ashley begin to talk in the office and the sawmill and in the course of the conversation, Scarlett realizes that she is no longer in love with Ashley. They share a friendly embrace and at that moment, India Wilkes and Archie walk in on them and assume they are having an affair.

The rumor of the affair spreads quickly through Atlanta but Melanie pays no heed to it and chastises anyone that dares mention it to her. Scarlett decides not to go to the party because she is ashamed of facing people with the rumors spreading about her but Rhett insists that she goes. Back home from the party, Scarlett and Rhett have an altercation after which Rhett makes love to her. She wakes up the next morning to hear that Rhett has gone on a trip with little Bonnie.

Before Rhett returns from his trip, Scarlett discovers that she is pregnant yet again. When Rhett returns, she angrily tells him how displeased she is about the pregnancy and Rhett sarcastically remarks that she will probably have a miscarriage. in response to the remark, Scarlett launches at him but mistakenly falls from the staircase and has a miscarriage.

Rhett buys a pony and teaches Bonnie to ride. One day, Bonnie dies from an accident while trying to jump a high bar with the pony and this puts a serious strain on Scarlett and Rhett’s marriage.

Scarlett takes a trip out of town but rushes back to Atlanta when Rhett messages her that Melanie is very ill. Melanie has just had a miscarriage from a pregnancy the doctors warned against and the complications are serious. Scarlett goes to Melanie’s sickbed and they talk, Melanie pleads with Scarlett to take care of Ashley and Beau when she dies. Scarlett meets Ashley distraught and realizes that Ashley had always been in love with Melanie.

Melanie dies and Scarlett is devastated. She walks back to her house alone and the mist and the darkness bring a dejavu of her nightmares, at that moment she realizes she longs for the comfort and security of Rhett’s arms and also realizes she is in love with Rhett.

When she gets home to Rhett, he has packed his belongings and is ready to leave. She pleads with him to stay with her and tells him she loves him but he is obstinate and tells her he cannot risk his heart anymore.

Scarlett asks him what she should do if he leaves and he responds that he does not give a damn.

When he leaves, Scarlett decides to return to Tara and assures herself that she can win Rhett back because after all “Tomorrow is another day”.

Is Tara a real Plantation?

No, Tara is not a real plantation. Tara is a fictional place in Margaret Mitchell’s popular historical fiction Gone with the Wind. It is a plantation in Clayton County acquired by the fictional character Gerald O’Hara on a wager with a stranger in Savannah. Tara was Gerald O’Hara’s most priced possession and he once told his daughter, Scarlett, that “Land is the only thing that lasts… the only thing worth fighting for” concerning Tara. Scarlett O’Hara would eventually come to love Tara later in the story.

How many times did Scarlett O’Hara marry in Gone with the Wind ?

Scarlett O’Hara married three times in Gone with the Wind. Her first marriage was to Charles Hamilton which she did to spite Ashley Wilkes. Her second marriage was to her sister’s beau Frank Kennedy, whom she snatched from her younger sister Suellen in a bid to save their home from bankruptcy. And her third marriage was to Rhett Butler with whom she had a bittersweet relationship.

What state is Gone with the Wind set in?

Gone with the Wind is set in the state of Georgia in the Southern part of the United States of America. Atlanta, Clayton County, and Jonesboro are some of the settings for the major events in the story.

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Gone With The Wind

Written by Margaret Mitchell Review by Andrea Connell

With this reissue of Gone with the Wind , I decided that it was time for me to finally read this Pulitzer Prize winning classic and see what all the fuss was about. I hadn’t seen the movie either, so this was going to be a clean slate affair for me.

Well, I am thankful that I read it. This book earns its reputation as one of America’s all time classics. This was the most multilayered, touching, and haunting depiction of war I have ever read. But it is not only about war and loss; it is about love, loyalty, bravery, and survival, and discovering too late what is really important in life.

This is an epic novel about the Confederacy. As a born and bred Northerner, I never understood the Southern point of view of the Civil War. Now, I do. I will always be grateful to this book for engaging my interest in the Civil War and opening my eyes to the Southern states’ suffering and their loss of an era.

On a literary level, Mitchell’s characters are fresh and alive, especially the detestable rogue turned doting father, Rhett Butler, the self-absorbed and determined Scarlett O’Hara, the loyal, sensitive, and saintly Melly Hamilton, and the stern yet loving Mammy. It was hard to find anything likable about Scarlett, a feeling I struggled with throughout the book. The same thought applied to Rhett, up until a certain point. There were enough likeable characters, on the other hand, to make up for that discomfort. But being forced to accept the characters as they truly are was one of the highlights of the novel. The book is HUGE (over 950 pages) and, for the most part, “unputdownable.” The book seems to have been well researched (at least from the Confederate viewpoint), and there are many descriptive details of battles, the burning of Atlanta and of the Georgian plantations, the plights of both slavery and emancipation, and the Reconstruction Era. I highly recommend this book, both for reading pleasure and for a poignant lesson in Civil War history.

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Gone with the Wind: Introduction

Gone with the wind: plot summary, gone with the wind: detailed summary & analysis, gone with the wind: themes, gone with the wind: quotes, gone with the wind: characters, gone with the wind: terms, gone with the wind: symbols, gone with the wind: theme wheel, brief biography of margaret mitchell.

Historical Context of Gone with the Wind

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Full Title: Gone with the Wind
When Written: 1926
Where Written: Atlanta, Georgia
When Published: 1936
Literary Period: Modernism
Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction, Bildungsroman
Setting: American South before, during, and after the Civil War
Climax: The Siege of Atlanta
Antagonist: Yankees, Reconstruction
Point of View: Third Person

Extra Credit for Gone with the Wind

Tomboy. When Margaret Mitchell was three years old, her dress caught fire at the stove. Her mother was so afraid it would happen again that she dressed her in pants from then on. Her brother—who refused to play with girls—played with her as long as she called herself Jimmy and pretended to be a boy, which she did until she was 14.

Controversy. Gone with the Wind has been banned in classrooms for its portrayal of race relations and for painting slavery and the pre-Civil War South in a favorable light. The famous movie adaption of the book has been removed from viewing platforms countless times for the same reason.

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Internet Archive - "Gone With The Wind"

Gone with the Wind , novel by Margaret Mitchell , published in 1936. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Gone with the Wind is a sweeping romantic story about the American Civil War from the point of view of the Confederacy . In particular it is the story of Scarlett O’Hara , a headstrong Southern belle who survives the hardships of the war and afterward manages to establish a successful business by capitalizing on the struggle to rebuild the South. Throughout the book she is motivated by her unfulfilled love for Ashley Wilkes, an honourable man who is happily married. After a series of marriages and failed relationships with other men, notably the dashing Rhett Butler , she has a change of heart and determines to win Rhett back.

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COMMENTS

Gone with the Wind Review: Mitchell's Controversial Legacy
Gone with the Wind is a book about how war, starvation, and adversity can reduce one's humanity to the basest instinct for survival at all costs. It follows Scarlett O'Hara's transition from a charming country girl whose only cares in the world were pretty dresses and handsome beaux, to a cold, hardened woman who would cheat, steal, murder, and numb her conscience to every value she once ...
Book Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Book Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Despite boasts that Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is "the greatest romance of our time," this approximately 1,000-page book is not just a romance. Its intense focus on a ruthless heroine neatly underscores what this brick of a book is instead: an exploration of transformation ...
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: Review, summary and analysis
Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Wikipedia. Originally published: June 30, 1936. Author: Margaret Mitchell.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, popularly known as Margaret Mitchell, was an American author, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her novel, Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 28 million copies. An American film adaptation, released in 1939, became the highest ...
Book Review: "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell
Updated: Apr 1, 2024 7:00 PM EDT. I might say Gone With the Wind is well-known to quite a lot of people around the world. Whether they have come across the novel or its famous film adaptation, Margaret Mitchell's characters are familiar to most and loved by many. I read this book for the first time just after I finished high school.
Gone with the Wind: Echoing Through the Ages
At just over 1,000 pages, Gone With the Wind is quite the chunkster. Its subject matter, too, is hefty. Combined, the length and plot are seemingly daunting and the primary reason why it took me so many years to take this book down off the shelf, where it has been sitting for a half-decade. Surprisingly, I found myself breezing through a ...
Gone with the Wind (novel)
Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936.The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era.It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty ...
1937 Pulitzer Prize Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The 1937 Pulitzer Prize Decision. The selection of Gone With The Wind as a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 was understandably controversial. At the time, there was a growing chorus of accusations exposing the rampant racism throughout the novel, and the Pulitzer Prize decision was also criticized for caving to popular opinion in selecting a bestseller, or what literary critic W.J. Stuckey calls ...
GONE WITH THE WIND
GONE WITH THE WIND. Don't sell this as primarily a novel of the Civil War. Sell it rather as a novel in human emotions against the background of the Civil War and its aftermath. It has the finer qualities of So Red The Rose, — the authentic picture of people and places and incidents, something of the moonlight and honeysuckle of the glamorous ...
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley. This book is a sequel to 'Gone with the Wind' written and published by another author in the year 1991. ' Scarlett' picks up from where ' Gone with the Wind ' stops and follows Scarlett's efforts to win the renewed love of Rhett Butler. Unfortunately, it is not as popular as Gone with the wind.
Review: Gone With The Wind
Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County, Georgia, and Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal ...
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: Book Review
Read more reviews at A Literary Odyssey, A Room of One's Own, and Age 30+ … A Lifetime of Books. If you liked Gone With the Wind, you might also like Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Buy Gone With the Wind at
Summary of "Gone With the Wind"
Gone With the Wind is the famous and controversial American novel by American writer, Margaret Mitchell. Here, she draws us into the lives and experiences of myriad colorful characters during (and after) the Civil War. Like William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Mitchell paints a romantic tale of star-crossed lovers, torn apart and brought ...
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Introducing Scarlett O'Hara. From the New York Times, June 1936: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (Macmillan $3) is an outsized novel of Civil War and Reconstruction days in Georgia. It is, in all probability, the biggest book of the year: 1,037 pages. I found it — well, it is best to delay the verdict for a few paragraphs.
Gone with the Wind Summary
Gone with the Wind is a historical fiction set in the American Civil war and has served as a reference point for many discussions on war, slavery, race, adaptation for survival, and values. Scarlett O'Hara is at the center of the story, a spoilt, rash teenager who is suddenly forced to face marriage, parenthood, widowhood, starvation, and poverty in quick succession and decides to do ...
Gone With The Wind
The book is HUGE (over 950 pages) and, for the most part, "unputdownable.". The book seems to have been well researched (at least from the Confederate viewpoint), and there are many descriptive details of battles, the burning of Atlanta and of the Georgian plantations, the plights of both slavery and emancipation, and the Reconstruction Era.
Gone with the Wind Study Guide
Gone with the Wind has at times been proposed a contender for the Great American novel. Other contenders with similar themes of racism and Reconstruction are Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Uncle Tom's Cabin can be the most closely compared with Gone with the Wind because it also ...
4 Prequels and Sequels to Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Rhett Butler's People (2014) Another GWTW-themed novel by Donald McCaig who reimagines the life of Ruth, AKA Mammy, this one is subtitled "The Authorized Novel based on Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.". This time it expands on the life of Rhett Butler. The reader gets his backstory and meets the family from which he came.
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind, novel by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936.It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Gone with the Wind is a sweeping romantic story about the American Civil War from the point of view of the Confederacy.In particular it is the story of Scarlett O'Hara, a headstrong Southern belle who survives the hardships of the war and afterward manages to establish a successful business by ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind was not just a book, it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of ...
Gone with the Wind Book Review (2024)
Gone with the Wind book was written in the 1930s by a Southern author who used the vernacular of the American Civil War. Some of the themes in the book are universal: hope, war, rape, starvation, strength in the face of adversity and exuberant optimism, but it seems that the plight of the slaves and the reasons for the American Civil War are ...

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