Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind, the 1936 novel by Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell, is the best-selling novel of the 20th century. It begins with talk of secession and follows Scarlett O'Hara through the U.S. Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. Successful almost from the moment of publication, the 1,037-page novel has continued to sell in impressive numbers into the 21st century. Central to the novel's popularity, and almost inseparable from it in the popular imagination, is David O. Selznick's 1939 film adaptation, one of the most popular films of all time. Both novel and movie have frequently been the center of controversy surrounding the inherent racism of the work. Less attention has been given to the treatment of class and the Irish identity of the title character.

Early reviewers may have compared Gone With the Wind to William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, but Margaret Mitchell's only novel has generally been looked upon with disdain by the literary establishment. Even though the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, it has been viewed by most academic critics as popular fiction, flawed and trivial. Nevertheless, it broke publishing records, selling more than two million copies by the time its 21-month run on the bestseller list ended. It has been translated into 40 languages, and more than 75 years after it was first published, it continues to sell around 75,000 copies each year.

Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900 and came of age in a region, in urban areas no less than in rural ones, where racial violence was a fact of life and prejudice against Jews and Catholics as well as African Americans was entrenched. In presenting slaves as happy, sometimes childlike, creatures whose identity rested in their relationship to their white owners or as bestial beings less than human, Mitchell was replicating the moral blindness of a system that owed its existence to slavery. The communist newspaper the Daily Worker accused Mitchell of inciting race hatred, but by and large, protests against the novel's racism were linked to the film.