Gone with the Wind (novel)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gone with the Wind arrived in bookstores in June 1936 at the virtually unprecedented price of three dollars, and within months it had sold roughly a million copies to a country still climbing out of the Great Depression. Margaret Mitchell, a journalist from Atlanta, had spent years on a manuscript she started in 1926 to pass the time while recovering from a slow-healing injury from an auto crash. The result was more than a thousand pages long and would win her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. It has never gone out of print. As of 2010, over 30 million copies have been printed worldwide, and a 2014 Harris poll ranked it second only to the Bible as the favorite book of American readers. What is it about a sprawling Civil War novel written by a Southern debutante-turned-reporter that lodged so deeply in American life? The answers lie in the story itself, in the woman who wrote it, and in the furious arguments it has sparked ever since.

• 2. The Woman Behind the Story

  ›

  Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900 in Atlanta, the city that serves as the beating heart of her novel. Her grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, was an Irish-American woman who had lived through the Civil War on the family plantation, called Rural Home, and she filled the young Mitchell's ears with first-hand stories of that era. Mitchell's mother, Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, was a suffragist who fought for women's right to vote. These two women shaped the author in contrasting directions: one rooted her in the romantic mythology of the Old South, the other pointed her toward a more independent future. As a young woman, Mitchell fell in love with an army lieutenant who was killed in World War I, and she carried his memory for the rest of her life. She studied at Smith College for a year, during which time her mother died from the 1918 pandemic flu, then returned to Atlanta. Her first marriage was to a man who turned out to be an abusive bootlegger. She took a job writing feature articles for the Atlanta Journal at a time when women of her social class were not expected to work. After divorcing, she married John Marsh, who had been the best man at her first wedding and who shared her passion for literature. Marsh, a copy editor by trade, helped edit the final version of the novel. Mitchell began writing in 1926, wrote the final scene first, then worked backward through the events that led to it. Harold Latham of the publishing house Macmillan encountered her manuscript in April 1935 and recognized its commercial potential. Mitchell spent another six months checking historical references and rewriting the opening chapter several times before publication.

• 3. Scarlett and Survival

  ›

  Mitchell named the theme of her novel herself. In 1936 she 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? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't." Scarlett O'Hara, the oldest daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, is sixteen years old in April 1861 when the story begins, and twenty-eight when it ends in 1873. Mitchell described her structure as a Bildungsroman, a novel concerned with the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood. Scarlett is not beautiful by the novel's own account, but she is charming, shrewd, and relentlessly determined. She marries three times, not for love but for survival: first to Charles Hamilton out of spite, then to storekeeper Frank Kennedy to pay the taxes on her family's plantation, Tara, and finally to Rhett Butler after Frank is killed in a Ku Klux Klan raid. Her so-called bad traits, which the novel lists as deceitfulness, shrewdness, manipulation, and superficiality, are exactly what allow her to outlast the catastrophe of the war and its brutal aftermath. The foil to all this is Melanie Wilkes, whose good belle traits, trust, self-sacrifice, and loyalty, make her beloved in Atlanta society but physically fragile. Melanie dies after a miscarriage late in the novel, and it is only at that moment that Scarlett realizes she has always loved Rhett, not Ashley.

• 4. The Title and Its Layers

  ›

  Mitchell originally titled the novel Tomorrow Is Another Day, taken from its famous last line. Other candidates on her working list included Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars, and Tote the Weary Load. The title she chose comes from the first line of the third stanza of a poem by the English poet Ernest Dowson: "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae." In the novel, Scarlett uses the phrase when she wonders whether her plantation home has survived or had "gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia." The title operates on at least three levels simultaneously. On the surface it refers to a way of life swept away by Sherman's March to the Sea. In Dowson's poem the phrase is about erotic loss, the regret of someone who has lost his feelings for a woman named Cynara, whose name comes from the Greek word for artichoke. There is also a possible third source: Mitchell may have been drawn by a line in James Joyce's Ulysses, in the chapter called "Aeolus," where the phrase "gone with the wind" is linked to the name Tara. The literary density packed into those four words proved more durable than any of her working alternatives.

• 5. Race, Myth, and Controversy

  ›

  From the moment of publication, the novel occupied contested ground on race and history. Mitchell placed her story squarely within a tradition of Southern plantation fiction, sometimes called Anti-Tom literature in reference to its stance against Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The enslaved people depicted in the novel are predominantly loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork, Prissy, and Uncle Peter, who are shown as choosing to remain with their enslaving families even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The character of Mammy never once, across more than a thousand pages, contemplates what her life might look like away from Tara. As early as 1918, eighteen years before Gone with the Wind was published, an article in the Confederate Veteran described the romanticized mammy figure in Southern literature as immortalized by her "faithfulness and devotion." Scholar Micki McElya, in her book Clinging to Mammy, argues the myth persisted because white Americans wished to inhabit a world in which African Americans were not angry over the injustice of slavery. Critics also took aim at Mitchell's treatment of the Ku Klux Klan. Author Pat Conroy, in his preface to a later edition, wrote that the Klan in the novel occupies "the same romanticized role it had in The Birth of a Nation and appears to be a benign combination of the Elks Club and a men's equestrian society." Historian Richard N. Current noted that Mitchell did not originate the myths about Reconstruction she repeated, and that most professional historians of her era had not yet corrected them either. The novel was banned from English classrooms in the Anaheim Union High School District in 1978 and challenged in the Waukegan, Illinois, school district in 1984. Controversy intensified in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and a national reckoning with systemic racism. James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, called the novel "profoundly racist and profoundly wrong."

• 6. Reception and Afterlife

  ›

  When the novel appeared in the summer of 1936, the trade press was divided on its merits. A critic at the New York Evening Post praised Mitchell for tossing out what he saw as technical tricks that other novelists had been playing with for twenty years. A reviewer at The New York Times was less charitable, arguing the book would have been infinitely better trimmed to around five hundred pages. Some reviewers compared it to William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Mitchell herself claimed Charles Dickens as her main influence and described Gone with the Wind as a "Victorian type novel." Helen Keller read the twelve-volume Braille edition and found it brought fond memories of her Southern infancy alongside sadness, given what she knew about the South. The novel's popularity in Nazi Germany was notable: within two days of its German publication in 1937, it had sold twelve thousand copies, and by 1941 that figure had reached two hundred seventy-six thousand. Sales held strong until 1942, when books by American authors were banned there. Mitchell received both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the second annual National Book Award for Fiction from the American Booksellers Association in 1937. The 1939 film adaptation, which she had no involvement in writing or producing, won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 12th annual ceremony and stars Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, and Olivia de Havilland. A musical adaptation titled Scarlett opened in Tokyo in 1970, arrived in London in 1972 reduced to four hours, and later transferred to Los Angeles and Dallas. Time magazine critics placed the novel on their list of the one hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 2003, the BBC's Big Read poll of the United Kingdom's best-loved novels ranked it twenty-first. A comic-book adaptation by Pierre Alary was published in French across the years 2023-2025, while an unabridged audiobook narrated by Liza Ross, originally released in 1998, was re-released in 2025.