Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · English

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What it is

Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled, wilful eldest daughter of a Georgia planter, is sixteen when the Civil War begins and in love with Ashley Wilkes, who marries his cousin Melanie. Through the siege and burning of Atlanta, hunger at the family plantation, Tara, and the hard years of Reconstruction, she fights to keep her land and herself, sparring all the while with the blockade-runner Rhett Butler.

Why it matters

The great American bestseller of its century: it won the 1937 Pulitzer, has sold more than 30 million copies and became the 1939 film. Its fond picture of the slave-owning South has made it as disputed as it is popular.

Reading it

About 1,000 pages. Easy to read: plain prose for a general reader.

Where to buy

Buy on Amazon

Your notes

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Influenced by2

Built on
A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens · 1843
Mitchell named Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol, as an inspiration, calling Gone with the Wind a Victorian kind of novel.
Wikipedia, Gone with the Wind (novel), Reviews
Responds to
Uncle Tom's Cabin · Harriet Beecher Stowe · 1852 (serialised 1851–52)
Gone with the Wind is read as the culmination of the plantation fiction, or anti-Tom literature, that answered Uncle Tom's Cabin by telling slavery from the slave owner's side.
Wikipedia, Gone with the Wind (novel), Slavery

Influenced1

Built on it
Gone with the Wind · Victor Fleming · 1939
In Film
An adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel.
Wikipedia, Gone with the Wind (film), infobox

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