Gone with the Wind facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Gone with the Wind

First-edition cover
Author	Margaret Mitchell
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Historical Fiction
Publisher	Macmillan Publishers (United States)
Publication date	June 30, 1936
Media type	Print (hard & paperback)
Pages	1037 (first edition) 1024 (Warner Books paperback)
ISBN	978-0-446-36538-3 (Warner)
OCLC	28491920
Dewey Decimal	813.52
Followed by	Scarlett Rhett Butler's People

Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea". This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae", written by Ernest Dowson.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Gone with the Wind is a reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.

Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which has been considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.

Title

The author tentatively titled the novel Tomorrow Is Another Day, from its last line. Other proposed titles included Bugles Sang True, Not in Our Stars, and Tote the Weary Load. The title Mitchell finally chose is from the first line of the third stanza of the poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae" by Ernest Dowson:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind ...

Scarlett O'Hara uses the title phrase when she wonders if her home on a plantation called "Tara" is still standing, or if it had "gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia". In a general sense, the title is a metaphor for the demise of a way of life in the South before the Civil War.

It is also possible that the author was influenced by the connection of the phrase "Gone with the wind" with Tara in a line of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the chapter "Aeolus".

Structure

Coming-of-age story

Margaret Mitchell arranged Gone with the Wind chronologically, focusing it on the life and experiences of the main character, Scarlett O'Hara, as she grew from adolescence into adulthood. During the time span of the novel, from 1861 to 1873, Scarlett ages from sixteen to twenty-eight years. This is a type of Bildungsroman, a novel concerned with the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming-of-age story). Scarlett's development is affected by the events of her time. Mitchell used a smooth linear narrative structure. The novel is known for its exceptional "readability". The plot is rich with vivid characters.

Genre

Gone with the Wind is often placed in the literary subgenre of the historical romance novel.

Plot elements

Slavery

Slavery in the United States in Gone with the Wind is a backdrop to a story that is essentially about other things. Southern plantation fiction (also known as Anti-Tom literature, in reference to reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin of 1852) from the mid-19th century, culminating in Gone with the Wind, is written from the perspective and values of the slaveholder and tends to present slaves as docile and happy.

Caste system

The characters in the novel are organized into two basic groups along class lines: the white planter class, such as Scarlett and Ashley, and the black house servant class. The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork, Prissy, and Uncle Peter. House servants are the highest "caste" of slaves in Mitchell's caste system. They choose to stay with their masters after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and subsequent Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 sets them free. Of the servants who stayed at Tara, Scarlett thinks, "There were qualities of loyalty and tirelessness and love in them that no strain could break, no money could buy."

The field slaves make up the lower class in Mitchell's caste system. The field slaves from the Tara plantation and the foreman, Big Sam, are taken away by Confederate soldiers to dig ditches and never return to the plantation. Mitchell wrote that other field slaves were "loyal" and "refused to avail themselves of the new freedom", but the novel has no field slaves who stay on the plantation to work after they have been emancipated.

American William Wells Brown escaped from slavery and published his memoir, or slave narrative, in 1847. He wrote of the disparity in conditions between the house servant and the field hand:

During the time that Mr. Cook was overseer, I was a house servant – a situation preferable to a field hand, as I was better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing bell, but about a half-hour after. I have often laid and heard the crack of the whip, and the screams of the slave.

Faithful and devoted slave

Although the novel is more than 1,000 pages long, the character of Mammy never considers what her life might be like away from Tara. She recognizes her freedom to come and go as she pleases, saying, "Ah is free, Miss Scarlett. You kain sen' me nowhar Ah doan wanter go", but Mammy remains duty-bound to "Miss Ellen's chile". (No other name for Mammy is given in the novel.)

Eighteen years before the publication of Gone with the Wind, an article titled, "The Old Black Mammy", written in the Confederate Veteran in 1918, discussed the romanticized view of the mammy character persisting in Southern literature:

for her faithfulness and devotion, she has been immortalized in the literature of the South; so the memory of her will never pass, but live on in the tales that are told of those "dear dead days beyond recall".

Micki McElya, in her book Clinging to Mammy, suggests the myth of the faithful slave, in the figure of Mammy, lingered because white Americans wished to live in a world in which African Americans were not angry over the injustice of slavery.

The best-selling anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852, is mentioned briefly in Gone with the Wind as being accepted by the Yankees as "revelation second only to the Bible". The enduring interest of both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone with the Wind has resulted in lingering stereotypes of 19th-century black slaves. Gone with the Wind has become a reference point for subsequent writers about the South, both black and white alike.

Southern belle

The southern belle is an archetype for a young woman of the antebellum American South upper class. The southern belle was believed to be physically attractive but, more importantly, personally charming with sophisticated social skills. She is subject to the correct code of female behavior. The novel's heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, charming though not beautiful, is a classic southern belle.

For young Scarlett, the ideal southern belle is represented by her mother, Ellen O'Hara. In "A Study in Scarlett", published in The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote:

The Southern belle was bred to conform to a subspecies of the nineteenth-century "lady" ... For Scarlett, the ideal is embodied in her adored mother, the saintly Ellen, whose back is never seen to rest against the back of any chair on which she sits, whose broken spirit everywhere is mistaken for righteous calm

However, Scarlett is not always willing to conform. Kathryn Lee Seidel, in her book, The Southern Belle in the American Novel, wrote:

part of her does try to rebel against the restraints of a code of behavior that relentlessly attempts to mold her into a form to which she is not naturally suited.

The figure of a pampered southern belle, Scarlett lives through an extreme reversal of fortune and wealth and survives to rebuild Tara and her self-esteem. Her bad belle traits (Scarlett's deceitfulness, shrewdness, manipulation, and superficiality), in contrast to Melanie's good belle traits (trust, self-sacrifice, and loyalty), enable her to survive in the post-war South and pursue her main interest, which is to make enough money to survive and prosper. Although Scarlett was "born" around 1845, she is portrayed to appeal to modern-day readers for her passionate and independent spirit, determination, and obstinate refusal to feel defeated.

Historical background

Marriage was supposed to be the goal of all southern belles, as women's status was largely determined by that of their husbands. All social and educational pursuits were directed towards it. Despite the Civil War and the loss of a generation of eligible men, young ladies were still expected to marry. By law and Southern social convention, household heads were adult, white propertied males, and all white women and all African Americans were thought to require protection and guidance because they lacked the capacity for reason and self-control.

The Atlanta Historical Society has produced a number of Gone with the Wind exhibits, among them a 1994 exhibit titled, "Disputed Territories: Gone with the Wind and Southern Myths". The exhibit asked, "Was Scarlett a Lady?", finding that historically most women of the period were not involved in business activities as Scarlett was during Reconstruction when she ran a sawmill. White women performed traditional jobs such as teaching and sewing, and generally disliked work outside the home.

During the Civil War, Southern women played a major role as volunteer nurses working in makeshift hospitals. Many were middle- and upper-class women who had never worked for wages or seen the inside of a hospital. One such nurse was Ada W. Bacot, a young widow who had lost two children. Bacot came from a wealthy South Carolina plantation family that owned 87 slaves.

In the fall of 1862, Confederate laws were changed to permit women to be employed in hospitals as members of the Confederate Medical Department. Twenty-seven-year-old nurse Kate Cumming from Mobile, Alabama, described the primitive hospital conditions in her journal:

They are in the hall, on the gallery, and crowded into very small rooms. The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but I soon got over it. We have to walk, and when we give the men any thing kneel, in blood and water; but we think nothing of it at all.

Battles

Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, June 27, 1864.

The Civil War came to an end on April 26, 1865, when Confederate General Johnston surrendered his armies in the Carolinas Campaign to Union General Sherman. Several battles are mentioned or depicted in Gone with the Wind.

Early and mid war years

• Seven Days Battles, June 25 – July 1, 1862, Richmond, Virginia, Confederate victory.
• Battle of Fredericksburg, December 11–15, 1862, Fredericksburg, Virginia, Confederate victory.
• Streight's Raid, April 19 – May 3, 1863, in northern Alabama. Union Colonel Streight and his men were captured by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Battle of Chancellorsville, April 30 – May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville, Virginia, Confederate victory.

Ashley Wilkes is stationed on the Rapidan River, Virginia, in the winter of 1863, later captured and sent to a Union prison camp, Rock Island.

• Siege of Vicksburg, May 18 – July 4, 1863, Vicksburg, Mississippi, Union victory.
• Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, fought in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Union victory. "They expected death. They did not expect defeat."
• Battle of Chickamauga, September 19–20, 1863, northwestern Georgia. The first fighting in Georgia and the most significant Union defeat.
• Chattanooga Campaign, November–December 1863, Tennessee, Union victory. The city became the supply and logistics base for Sherman's 1864 Atlanta Campaign.

Atlanta Campaign

Sherman's Atlanta Campaign

The Atlanta Campaign (May–September 1864) took place in northwest Georgia and the area around Atlanta.

Confederate General Johnston fights and retreats from Dalton (May 7–13) to Resaca (May 13–15) to Kennesaw Mountain (June 27). Union General Sherman suffers heavy losses to the entrenched Confederate army. Unable to pass through Kennesaw, Sherman swings his men around to the Chattahoochee River where the Confederate army is waiting on the opposite side of the river. Once again, General Sherman flanks the Confederate army, forcing Johnston to retreat to Peachtree Creek (July 20), five miles northeast of Atlanta.

• Battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864, just southeast of Atlanta. The city would not fall until September 2, 1864. Heavy losses for Confederate General Hood.
• Battle of Ezra Church, July 28, 1864, Sherman's failed attack west of Atlanta where the railroad entered the city.
• Battle of Utoy Creek, August 5–7, 1864, Sherman's failed attempt to break the railroad line at East Point, into Atlanta from the west, heavy Union losses.
• Battle of Jonesborough, August 31 – September 1, 1864, Sherman successfully cut the railroad lines from the south into Atlanta. The city of Atlanta was abandoned by General Hood and then occupied by Union troops for the rest of the war.

March to the Sea

The Savannah Campaign was conducted in Georgia during November and December 1864.

President Lincoln's murder

Although Abraham Lincoln is mentioned in the novel 14 times, no reference is made to his assassination on April 14, 1865.

Themes

Survival

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, 1936

Adaptations

Gone with the Wind has been adapted several times for stage and screen:

• The novel was the basis of the classic Academy Award-winning 1939 film of the same name. The film has been considered one of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, and upon release, was immensely popular in its own right. It was produced by David O. Selznick and stars Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland.
• The book was adapted into a musical, Scarlett, which opened in Tokyo in 1970 (in 1966 it was produced as a nine-hour play without music), and in London in 1972, where it was reduced to four hours. The London production opened in 1973 in Los Angeles, and again in Dallas in 1976.
• The Japanese Takarazuka Revue produced a musical adaptation of the novel, Kaze to Tomo ni Sarinu, which was performed by the all-female Moon Troupe in 1977. The most recent performance was in January 2014 by the Moon Troupe, with Todoroki Yuu as Rhett Butler and Ryu Masaki as Scarlett O'Hara.
• A 2003 French musical adaptation was produced by Gérard Presgurvic, Autant en emporte le vent.
• The book was adapted into a British musical, Gone with the Wind, and opened in 2008 in the U.K. at the New London Theatre.
• A full-length three-act classical ballet version, with a score arranged from the works of Antonín Dvořák and choreographed by Lilla Pártay, premiered in 2007 as performed by the Hungarian National Ballet. It was revived in their 2013 season.
• A new stage adaptation by Niki Landau premiered at the Manitoba Theatre Center in Winnipeg, Canada in January 2013.

Legacy

One story of the legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide incorrectly think it was the "true story" of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film adaptation of the novel "amplified this effect". The plantation legend was "burned" into the mind of the public. Moreover, her fictional account of the war and its aftermath has influenced how the world has viewed the city of Atlanta for successive generations.

Some readers of the novel have seen the film first and read the novel afterward. One difference between the film and the novel is the staircase scene, in which Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs. In the film, Scarlett weakly struggles and does not scream as Rhett starts up the stairs. In the novel, "he hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened."

Earlier in the novel, Scarlett is attacked by a black man who rips open her dress while a white man grabs hold of the horse's bridle. She is rescued by another black man, Big Sam. In the film, she is attacked by a white man, while a black man grabs the horse's bridle.

The Library of Congress began a multiyear "Celebration of the Book" in July 2012 with an exhibition on Books That Shaped America, and an initial list of 88 books by American authors that have influenced American lives. Gone with the Wind was included in the Library's list. Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington said:

This list is a starting point. It is not a register of the 'best' American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not.

Among books on the list considered to be the Great American Novel were Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Throughout the world, the novel appeals due to its universal themes: war, love, death, racial conflict, class, gender and generation, which speak especially to women. In North Korea, readers relate to the novel's theme of survival, finding it to be "the most compelling message of the novel". Margaret Mitchell's personal collection of nearly 70 foreign language translations of her novel was given to the Atlanta Public Library after her death.

On August 16, 2012, the Archdiocese of Atlanta announced that it had been bequeathed a 50% stake in the trademarks and literary rights to Gone With the Wind from the estate of Margaret Mitchell's deceased nephew, Joseph Mitchell. Margaret Mitchell had separated from the Catholic Church. However, one of Mitchell's biographers, Darden Asbury Pyron, stated that Margaret Mitchell had "an intense relationship" with her mother, who was a Roman Catholic.

The GI Joe: A Real American Hero character Scarlett's last name is O'Hara and is from Atlanta, Georgia, although the code name seems to relate to her being a redhead.

Publication history

Original manuscript

The Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, Georgia, where Margaret Mitchell wrote her novel, is now operated as the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.

Although some of Mitchell's papers and documents related to the writing of Gone with the Wind were burned after her death, many documents, including assorted draft chapters, were preserved. The last four chapters of the novel are held by the Pequot Library of Southport, Connecticut.

Publication and reprintings (1936 – US)

The first printing of 10,000 copies contains the original publication date: "Published May, 1936". After the book was chosen as the Book-of-the-Month Club's selection for July, the publication was delayed until June 30. The second printing of 25,000 copies (and subsequent printings) contains the release date: "Published June, 1936". The third printing of 15,000 copies was made in June 1936. Additionally, 50,000 copies were printed for the Book-of-the-Month Club July selection. Gone with the Wind was officially released to the American public on June 30, 1936.

Sequels and prequels

Although Mitchell refused to write a sequel to Gone with the Wind, Mitchell's estate authorized Alexandra Ripley to write a sequel, which was titled Scarlett. The book was subsequently adapted into a television mini-series in 1994. A second sequel was authorized by Mitchell's estate titled Rhett Butler's People, by Donald McCaig. The novel parallels Gone with the Wind from Rhett Butler's perspective. In 2010, Mitchell's estate authorized McCaig to write a prequel, which follows the life of the house servant Mammy, whom McCaig names "Ruth". The novel, Ruth's Journey, was released in 2014.

The copyright holders of Gone with the Wind attempted to suppress publication of The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, which retold the story from the perspective of the slaves. A federal appeals court denied the plaintiffs an injunction (Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin) against publication on the basis that the book was a parody and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The parties subsequently settled out of court and the book went on to become a New York Times Best Seller.

A book sequel unauthorized by the copyright holders, The Winds of Tara by Katherine Pinotti, was blocked from publication in the United States. The novel was republished in Australia, avoiding U.S. copyright restrictions.

Away from copyright lawsuits, Internet fan fiction has proved to be a fertile medium for sequels (some of them book-length), parodies, and rewritings of Gone with the Wind.

Numerous unauthorized sequels to Gone with the Wind have been published in Russia, mostly under the pseudonym Yuliya Hilpatrik, a cover for a consortium of writers. The New York Times states that most of these have a "Slavic" flavor.

Several sequels were written in Hungarian under the pseudonym Audrey D. Milland or Audrey Dee Milland, by at least four different authors (who are named in the colophon as translators to make the book seem a translation from the English original, a procedure common in the 1990s but prohibited by law since then). The first one picks up where Ripley's Scarlett ended, the next one is about Scarlett's daughter Cat. Other books include a prequel trilogy about Scarlett's grandmother Solange and a three-part miniseries of a supposed illegitimate daughter of Carreen.

Copyright status

Gone with the Wind has been in the public domain in Australia since 1999 (50 years after Margaret Mitchell's death). On January 1, 2020, the book entered the public domain in the European Union (70 years after the author's death). Under an extension of copyright law, Gone with the Wind will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2031.

See also

• Southern Renaissance
• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century