Gone with the Wind

’My dear, I don’t give a damn.’

Margaret Mitchell’s page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War.

The lovers at the novel’s centre - the selfish, privileged Scarlett O’Hara and rakish Rhett Butler - are magnetic: pulling readers into the tangled narrative of a struggle to survive that cannot be forgotten.

WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND PULITZER PRIZE

’For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before’ The New Yorker

’What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under?’ Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell was born 8 November 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia. After a childhood surrounded by relatives who had survived the Civil War she enrolled at Smith College, Massachusetts, but was forced to return to the family home after her mother’s death. After a difficult first marriage Mitchell became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine and was married again in 1925. In 1926, due to an ankle injury, Mitchell stopped work as a reporter and began to write the Civil War novel which would become Gone with the Wind (1936). She was persuaded by a friend at Macmillan to submit the novel and upon publication it sold more copies than any other novel in American history and was awarded a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. The 1939 Hollywood film adaptation garnered eight Oscars and became the highest-grossing film of all time in the US and Canada. Mitchell died tragically on 16 August 1949. Her novella Lost Laysen was published posthumously in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. By 2000 30 million copies of Gone with the Wind had sold in 40 languages.