Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is a historical novel by the American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in June 1936, the only novel she published in her lifetime and the product of a decade of writing she began while recovering from a car accident. Set in Georgia between 1861 and 1873, it follows Scarlett O'Hara, the strong-willed sixteen-year-old daughter of a plantation owner, through the American Civil War and its Reconstruction aftermath, tracing her unrequited love for the gentle Ashley Wilkes, her three marriages, first to Charles Hamilton, then to Frank Kennedy, and finally to the roguish blockade runner Rhett Butler, and her fierce, often ruthless determination to rebuild her family's fortunes and hold onto her home, Tara, amid the devastation of Sherman's march and the collapse of the antebellum South. The novel won Mitchell the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became an immediate and enduring bestseller, with more than thirty million copies printed worldwide and a 2014 Harris poll ranking it Americans' second favorite book after the Bible, while its 1939 film adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture; the novel has also remained a persistently controversial reference point in American literature for its romanticized portrayal of the plantation South and its stereotyped depiction of enslaved characters.