Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gone with the Wind was written by American author Margaret Mitchell and first published in June 1936. Mitchell was born in Atlanta in 1900 and began writing the novel in 1926 while recovering from an auto-crash injury.
Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 and the second annual National Book Award for Fiction from the American Booksellers Association that same year. The 1939 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony.
The title comes from the first line of the third stanza of the poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae" by English poet Ernest Dowson. In the novel, the phrase describes the destruction of a Southern way of life swept away by Sherman's March to the Sea, and in Dowson's poem it alludes to erotic loss.
As of 2010, over 30 million copies had been printed in the United States and abroad. A 2014 Harris poll ranked it the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible.
The novel has been criticized for its stereotypical portrayal of African Americans, its romanticization of antebellum plantation life, and its downplayed depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. It was banned from English classrooms in the Anaheim Union High School District in Anaheim, California in 1978, and challenged in Waukegan, Illinois in 1984. Controversy intensified again in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.
Gone with the Wind follows Scarlett O'Hara, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, from the eve of the Civil War in 1861 through the Reconstruction era in 1873. The story centers on her survival, her three marriages, and her unrequited love for Ashley Wilkes, while her complex relationship with the charming and cynical Rhett Butler forms the novel's emotional core.