Gone With The Wind

Gone with the Wind (1936) is the only novel by author Margaret Mitchell published during her lifetime. It is an enduring but controversial classic of American literature, and according to one poll, its popularity among American readers is only exceeded by the Bible. Thirty million copies have been sold worldwide.

The novel’s tale of the Civil War is told from the perspective of the wealthy planter class that ruled the antebellum South, a class from which Mitchell herself descended. Before writing Gone with the Wind, Mitchell had been a reporter for The Atlanta Journal, though her patrician family discouraged her aspirations of becoming a professional writer.

Published during the Great Depression, Gone with the Wind became an instant bestseller and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. It was made into an equally successful film in 1939 starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, which won multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The novel is both a bildungsroman and a romance, as well as an example of Southern Romanticism.

This study guide and all its page citations are based on the Kindle edition of the novel.