Gone with the Wind

Overview

Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time.

Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. None take us into the burning fields and cities of the American South as Gone With the Wind does, creating haunting scenes and thrilling portraits of characters so vivid that we remember their words and feel their fear and hunger for the rest of our lives.

In the two main characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, contemptuous Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless story of survival under the harshest of circumstances, she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet.

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Author Information

Bio of Margaret Mitchell

American author of the enormously popular novel GONE WITH WIND (1936), story about the Civil War and Reconstruction as seen from the Southern point of view. The book was adapted into a highly popular film in 1939, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. At the novel's opening in 1861, Scarlett O'Hara is a young girl. During the story she experiences Secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as three marriages and motherhood. Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta. Her mother was a suffragist and father a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the Confederate Army had fought there during the American Civil War. At the age of fifteen she wrote in her journal: "If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I'd be a prize fighter - anything fpr the thrills." Mitchell graduated from the local Washington Seminary and started in 1918 to study medicine at Smith College. When Mitchell's mother died in 1919, she returned to home to keep house for her father and brother. In 1922 she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. The disastrous marriage was climaxed by spousal rape and was annulled 1924. Mitchell started her career as a journalist in 1922 under the name Peggy Mitchell, writing articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews for the Atlanta Journal. Mitchell's book broke sales records, the New Yorker praised it, and the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom admired "the architectural persistence behind the big work" but criticized the book as overly Southern, particularly in its treatment of Reconstruction. Malcolm Cowley's disdain in his review originated partly from the book's popularity. John Peale Bishop dismissed the novel as merely "one more of those 1000 page novels. competent but neither very good nor very sound." In 1937 Gone with the Wind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Bio of Pat Conroy

The novelist Pat Conroy's life and personal experience are so inextricably bound up with his writing that, at first glance, it might seem that he is merely retelling the story of his life, again and again. The truth is, as usual, far more complicated and interesting. Significant elements and characters in his novels are obviously drawn from his life, a choice that apparently has created tremendous tension in his family. But these facts are merely points of departure for the author, who has a gift that is perhaps the most desirable and elusive of all for any novelist -- the ability to spin an unforgettable story. Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta, the eldest of seven children and the son of Col. Donald Conroy, a man not unlike the hero of "The Great Santini." He attended The Citadel, the South Carolina military academy that inspired the setting for The Lords of Discipline, and briefly taught school on an island off the South Carolina coast, an experience recounted in The Water Is Wide. The fallout from his life with his family seems to have inspired Conroy to create deeply compelling stories of vivid characters searching for love and fulfillment. These tales are invariably rooted in the infernal complexities and often dark realities of Southern tradition, notably in The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The death of his mother -- a crafty Southern woman who chose to be called Peggy, after the author of "Gone With the Wind" -- led him to write his most recent novel "Beach Music." Though Conroy's books have created publicized rifts within his own family, they stand on their own with the public and most critics, having been embraced by a faithful and ever-growing readership and inspiring popular film adaptations. "Misfortune," Garry Abrams wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "has been good to novelist Pat Conroy."

Customer Reviews

• Great Classic

  Posted June 27, 2009 by PH, Houston

  Intense, page-turner, suspenseful. Still reading...

Additional Info

Imprint

Scribner

Filesize

1.76 MB

Number of Pages

960

eBook ISBN

1416573461