Gone with the Wind

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

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.

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of an attorney who was president of the Atlanta Historical Society. She married in 1925, and spent the following ten years putting down on paper the stories she had heard about the Civil War. The result was Gone With The Wind, first published in 1936. It won the Pulitzer price, sold over ten million copies, was translated into eighteen languages and was later made into one of the best-loved films of all time starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. This book, a record bestseller, was her only published work. She died in 1949.