Gone With the Wind
SynopsisPlot
Widely considered The Great American Novel, and often remembered for its epic film version, Gone With the Wind explores the depth of human passions with an intensity as bold as its setting in the red hills of Georgia. A superb piece of storytelling, it vividly depicts the drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, who arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life. A sweeping story of tangled passion and courage, in the pages of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell brings to life the unforgettable characters that have captured readers for over seventy years.
Story
About this book
Gone With the Wind is set in the red clay country of northern Georgia, beginning in 1861 as the American Civil War approaches. At the center is Scarlett O'Hara, the eldest daughter of a plantation owner, whose comfortable life is upended by the war and the long period of Reconstruction that follows. Scarlett is stubborn, self-interested, and resourceful, and the novel tracks her efforts to hold on to her family's land and status as the social order around her collapses.
Margaret Mitchell published the novel in 1936 after working on it for nearly a decade. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and sold widely both in the United States and abroad, with reported sales exceeding 28 million copies across more than 37 countries. The 1939 film adaptation became one of the most commercially successful motion pictures ever released.
The book portrays plantation society, the destruction brought by war, and the unstable years that followed, all filtered through the ambitions and attachments of its central characters. Mitchell's portrait of the antebellum South reflects the mythologies and prejudices of its era, and the novel has been the subject of ongoing discussion about how it represents slavery and race.
