Gone with the Wind

This is beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best. I would go so far as to say that it is, in narrative power … surpassed by nothing in American fiction. * The New York Times *For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before * The New Yorker *Gone With The Wind is a rich, complicated book … we can and should argue about a story that’s achieved such a hold on the American imagination * The Washington Post *Mitchell carefully analyses the nature of human resilience, and holds up hopefulness as the critical tool for getting through the worst times… most of all, in the[se] bleak days … it is Scarlett’s belief that tomorrow will be better that feels endlessly and gleefully hopeful. After all, as she knows so well: “Tomorrow is another day.” * The Guardian *Anyone who has not read it has missed one of the greatest literary experiences a reader can have.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? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that 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

Margaret Mitchell was born 8 November 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia. After a childhood surrounded by relatives who had survived the Civil War she enrolled at Smith College, Massachusetts, but was forced to return to the family home after her mother’s death. After a difficult first marriage Mitchell became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine and was married again in 1925. In 1926, due to an ankle injury, Mitchell stopped work as a reporter and began to write the Civil War novel which would become Gone with the Wind (1936). She was persuaded by a friend at Macmillan to submit the novel and upon publication it sold more copies than any other novel in American history and was awarded a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. The 1939 Hollywood film adaptation garnered eight Oscars and became the highest-grossing film of all time in the US and Canada. Mitchell died tragically on 16 August 1949. Her novella Lost Laysen was published posthumously in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. By 2000 30 million copies of Gone with the Wind had sold in 40 languages.