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Gone with the Wind
is a 1936 American novel by Margaret Mitchell set in
the Old South during the American Civil War and
Reconstruction.
The novel
won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an
Academy Award-winning 1939 film of the same name. It was
also adapted during the 1970s into a stage musical
titled Scarlett; there is also a 2008 new musical stage
adaptation in London's West End titled Gone With The
Wind. It is the only novel by Mitchell published during
her lifetime, and it took her ten years to write it. The
novel is one of the most popular books of all time,
selling more than 30 million copies (see list of
best-selling books). Over the years, the novel has also
been analyzed for its symbolism and treatment of
mythological archetypes.
In Gone with the Wind,
Tara was
founded by Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara after he won
640 acres of land from its absentee owner during an
all-night poker game. Very much an Irish peasant farmer
rather than the merchant his elder brothers (whose
emigrations to Savannah had brought him to Georgia)
wanted him to be, Gerald relished the thought of
becoming a planter and gave his mostly wilderness and
uncultivated new lands the grandiose name of Tara after
the hill of Tara, once the capitol of the High King of
ancient Ireland. He borrowed money from his brothers and
bankers to buy slaves and turned the farm into a very
successful cotton plantation.
At 43, Gerald married the 15-year-old
Ellen Robillard, an aristocratic, Savannah-born girl of
French descent, receiving as dowry twenty slaves
(including Mammy, Ellen's nurse, who became nurse to
Ellen's daughters and grandchildren as well). His young
bride took a very real interest in the management of the
plantation, being in some ways a more hands-on manager
than her husband. With the injection of her dowry money
and the rise of cotton prices, Tara grew to a plantation
of more than 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) and more than 100
slaves by the dawn of the Civil War.
Gone With The Wind (1939) is
often considered the most beloved, enduring and popular
film of all time. Sidney Howard's script was derived
from Margaret Mitchell's first and only published,
best-selling Civil War and Reconstruction Period novel
of 1,037 pages that first appeared in 1936, but was
mostly written in the late 1920s. Producer David O.
Selznick had acquired the film rights to Mitchell's
novel in July, 1936 for $50,000 - a record amount at the
time to an unknown author for her first novel, causing
some to label the film "Selznick's Folly." At the time
of the film's release, the fictional book had surpassed
1.5 million copies sold. More records were set when the
film was first aired on television in two parts in late
1976, and controversy arose when it was restored and
released theatrically in 1998.
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