Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
Summary
Scarlett O'Hara is sixteen when the Civil War starts, the spoiled daughter of a north Georgia plantation, in love with Ashley Wilkes, who marries his cousin Melanie instead. Out of spite she marries Charles Hamilton, who promptly dies in uniform, and by the middle of the war she is a widow in Atlanta watching the world that produced her burn to the ground.
What the novel is actually about is what she does next. Scarlett is vain, selfish, nearly illiterate about other people, and equipped with a survival drive nobody around her can match. She digs, trades, marries her sister's suitor Frank Kennedy for his money, runs lumber mills with convict labour, and claws Tara back from ruin, all while failing to notice for a thousand pages that the man who actually matches her is Rhett Butler, blockade runner and professional teller of unwelcome truths. Their marriage, their daughter Bonnie, and the losses that finally break it carry the last third.
It is 1,037 pages and it moves like a much shorter book. Mitchell could plot, could write talk, and built in Scarlett and Rhett two of the most durable characters in American fiction.
It is also a Lost Cause novel to the bone. Slavery is benign, enslaved people are loyal and content, and Reconstruction is a horror inflicted on white Georgia. None of that is incidental to the book; it is the book's view of the world.
Best for readers who want to understand the single most popular American novel of its century, read with both eyes open.
Historical Context & Significance
Gone with the Wind won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. Published on 30 June 1936 at the unheard of price of three dollars, it sold roughly a million copies by December and was the bestselling American novel through 1937. The same season produced Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, a novel about the same state and the same history that won nothing; the two books have been read against each other ever since.
Margaret Mitchell was an Atlanta journalist who began the manuscript in 1926 while laid up after an injury and spent six months checking its history before publication. It was the only novel she published: in August 1949 she was struck by a speeding off duty taxi driver while crossing Peachtree Street and died five days later.
The 1939 film won Best Picture and fixed the story in the world's head. The modern reckoning is equally settled: scholars treat the novel as the most influential single carrier of Lost Cause mythology in popular culture, faithful slaves and romanticised planters included, and it keeps selling anyway, which is exactly the problem it poses.