Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind, novel by American author Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936. A sweeping romantic story about the American Civil War, it follows the story of headstrong Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara and recounts the war and the Reconstruction era from the point of view of the Confederacy. The book was an immediate success: It sold 50,000 copies in one day, and within six months one million copies had been printed. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937, was made into an epic Hollywood film in 1939, and became the best-selling novel in U.S. history. Yet Gone with the Wind also has its critics, especially those who think it perpetuates racist and sexist themes and ignores the brutal realities of slavery.

Summary and characters

Set in Georgia (Mitchell was an Atlanta native), Gone with the Wind centers on Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled but willful young woman who survives the hardships of the war and afterward establishes a successful business by capitalizing on the struggle to rebuild the South. Throughout the book she is motivated by her determination to maintain Tara, the O’Hara family’s plantation, and by her unfulfilled love for Ashley Wilkes, an honorable man who is happily married to Melanie Hamilton, a sweet, mild-mannered woman who is the model of Christian charity. After two loveless marriages—including to Melanie’s naive young brother, Charles Hamilton, and to Frank Kennedy, a middle-aged business owner who Scarlett lures away from her younger sister Suellen—Scarlett marries the dashing Rhett Butler.

Though born a Southern gentleman, Butler is alienated from his family and consorts with Northerners during the war. He has a realistic view of the South’s chances in the war, but, just before the South capitulates, he joins its “hopeless cause.” Similarly, he pursues Scarlett, despite her continued hankering for Ashley, because he admires her tenacity. Scarlett, meanwhile, is attracted to Rhett’s rakishness as well as his wealth. Sparks fly throughout their marriage, which becomes strained after the death of their young daughter, Bonnie Blue Butler, in a horseback riding accident. Ultimately, Scarlett’s selfishness and her fixation on Ashley drive Rhett away. After he leaves, she has a change of heart and determines to win Rhett back.

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Writing and publication history

Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind in 1926 after an ankle injury, aggravated by arthritis, led her to resign from her job as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She initially named her heroine Pansy O’Hara and worked on the novel sporadically for nine years. In 1935 the manuscript came to the attention of the Macmillan publishing company through the recommendation of its associate editor Lois Dwight Cole, a close friend of Mitchell’s. Macmillan suggested the title Tomorrow Is Another Day, but Mitchell chose Gone with the Wind, based on a line in Ernest Dowson’s 1891 poem “Cynara.” Before publication, Mitchell also changed her main character’s first name to Scarlett.

Gone with the Wind was Mitchell’s only novel. For many years after its release, Mitchell insisted that, because of the disruption the book caused in her life, she had no intention of ever writing again. By the late 1940s, however, she was considering ideas for a new novel. On August 11, 1949, Mitchell was crossing a street in Atlanta on her way to a movie theater when she was struck by a speeding car. She suffered extensive internal injuries and a skull fracture, and she died five days later.

Film version and controversies

The film adaptation of Gone with the Wind, which stars Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett, is considered one of the greatest films ever made. Mitchell had sold the motion-picture rights to producer David O. Selznick for $50,000, which was the highest amount ever paid to a debut novelist at the time.

Notably, the film condenses some of the book’s storyline. For example, Scarlett has three children in the novel but only one in the movie. The filmmakers also altered the book’s most notorious scene, in which the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) comes to Scarlett’s rescue after she is assaulted by a Black man. In the movie, her attacker is white and her avengers are not clearly stated to be the KKK.

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The novel also perpetuates the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War, which romanticized “Southern honor” in the face of claimed Northern depredations and fueled the South’s violent opposition to Reconstruction. Mitchell, who was born in 1900, had grown up hearing from her family firsthand accounts of the war and its effects. During the war’s final stages, about 40 percent of Atlanta had been burned by Union forces at the start of William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, which brought fighting to a close in Georgia and helped the Union win the war. Sherman’s scorched-earth campaign had a lasting effect across the South and contributed to the mythical Lost Cause interpretation. In Gone with the Wind, the scene involving Scarlett’s assault draws from this tradition of depicting Reconstruction as a period characterized by unjust burdens being placed on white citizens and lawlessness caused by the emancipation of formerly enslaved Black people.

Among the book’s defenders are those who consider the strong-willed Scarlett O’Hara to be a feminist character. Indeed, despite her many flaws, Scarlett’s determination to survive the war and to maintain Tara at nearly any cost makes her one of the most formidable heroines in romance literature.

Sequels

Decades after Mitchell’s death, her estate authorized novelist Alexandra Ripley to write Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1991), which was an international best-seller but panned by critics. In 2001 Mitchell’s estate, claiming copyright infringement, sued to block the publication of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parodic sequel told from the perspective of a formerly enslaved woman. The case was settled out of court. Mitchell’s estate later authorized two additional derivative novels: Rhett Butler’s People (2007) and Ruth’s Journey (2014), both of which were written by historical novelist Donald McCaig.