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    Gone With The Wind
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    Gone With The Wind
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    Gone With The Wind
    Ebook1,465 pages24 hours

    Gone With The Wind

    By Margaret Mitchell

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Gone with the Wind is the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled Southern belle who uses her wits and her wiles to lift herself and her family out of the ashes left by Sherman’s March to the Sea during the American Civil War, only to learn the true meaning of love and friendship as she loses those who have become most dear to her.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 7, 2012
    ISBN9781443414159
    Author

    Margaret Mitchell

    Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia into a family passionately interested in American history. She grew up in an atmosphere of stories about the Civil War which she committed to paper in the ten years following her marriage in 1925. The result was Gone With The Wind, first published in 1936. It won the Pulitzer Prize, sold over ten million copies, was translated in eighteen languages, and was one of the most successful films ever made starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Gone With The Wind was her only published work. She died in 1949.

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    Reviews for Gone With The Wind

    4.5/5

    6,350 ratings222 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I started this a couple weeks ago and plan to 'work at it' this summer.

      This was SO much easier to read than I thought it would be. I thoroughly enjoyed it!
    • 2/5
      This book remains safely protected under the cover of a Pulitzer Prize, otherwise its raving racism would have been denounced. Anyone nowadays who dared to write a book referring to blacks as Mrs. Mitchell did, would be torn to shreds. Throughout the book Scarlet laments that her "too dear a homeland" was being "turned over to ignorant Negroes drunk with whisky and freedom." Scarlet feels toward Blacks the same way I believe modern Democrats seem to feel: Blacks are minors who can’t possibly survive without help from Whites! I hoped she would change her mindset and see the light; but Mitchell never takes the time to enlighten her character: Scarlet goes on with the same condescending attitude. The Klan was not a racist endeavor, but was created out of the concern of the good Southern whites, to deal with "insolent negroes" who were turning fond eyes on white women; paradoxically, these are the same negroes are also described as trusted, faithful, and loyal... The Yankees are just plain mean, because they wanted to give blacks the vote and believed interracial marriage should be legal. History tells us of slaves been snatched through the North from the Southern plantations and sent to Canada by these same evil Yankees. Where I live (near Lake Erie) you can still visit the houses that served as safe havens for slaves running away from their owners in the South—the "Underground Railroad"; I'm sure these fugitive slaves just misunderstood the good intentions of their owners down in the South, right? If Mitchell wanted to impart the view that Whites and Blacks are equal—which was supposedly the one she espoused—she had ample opportunity--all missed and she failed monstrously! Her book gets readings at the Margaret Mitchell's Museum in Atlanta, but I am sure only very well selected parts are read out loud. If published today, this book would have caused riots bigger than the LA ones. (It is interesting to note that President Lincoln (a White man) justified his fight against enslaving other human beings on religious grounds.)
    • 4/5
      great insight into human relationships, AND blatant attempt to re-write the horror of slavery
    • 5/5
      Loved this book!
    • 4/5
      It's a classic and I'm glad that I read it. It was well written and kept my attention. I was surprised by how pro antebellum south and how anti Yankee it was. I don't think I would ever reread it because it didn't stir up new ideas for me.
    • 4/5
      Very different than the movie - a true look at how whites and blacks lived and worked together during a time where slavery was acceptable. If you love the romance part of the story you will be bogged down by the politics. However, very educational for a historical novel. If you love the romance read Scarlett.
    • 5/5
      Mastepiece!
    • 4/5
      A guilty pleasure.
    • 3/5
      Gone with the Wind is an American War & Peace. This is serious literature, which won the Pulitzer prize, no less. Most people don't see past the epic plot (which isn't as cut and dried as you may think) or the love story, but this is no less than a successfull attempt to reclaim a discarded culture. It is not about crinoline and lace, it is about the Apocalypse and how losers of the counter-revolution must learn to live in a place where all their politics, personal or civil, are demolished. Scarlett O'Hara is popular because she is an American, driven, materialistic, sentimental and utterly ruthless. Rhett Bulter is the tragic character of this book; the way of life and ideals he disdained are killing him, and he suffers like no one else in this post-apocalyptic landscape. His departure at the end is an act of contrition as much as a romantic failure; he had tried to recreate the materialism of the ante-bellum world, but negeclected the spirituality (such as it is) of men like Ashley Wilkes. Both men, the dreamer and the realist end up alone in a very sterile place. This book is proto-feminist as well. Scarlett survives, even as everything around her dies, but in the end, she too is alone.

      The author's use of prose was beautiful, all the scenes and action came alive. Some will be offended by the racism in the book, but that's how things were back then. Sugar coating it would have ruined the story reducing it to a Harlequin romance.

      This is an incredibly well written book about the death of a civilization and the struggles to survive in the new era. This is a book that should not be missed, particulary those who enjoy historical fiction.
    • 5/5
      Best book ever!
    • 5/5
      Wonderful.
    • 5/5
      GONE WITH THE WINDbyMargaret MitchellGone with the Wind is Margaret Mitchell's historical novel that follows the life of Scarlet O'Hara, a Southern Belle, during the American Civil War and the resulting period of reconstruction. It took Mitchell 9 drafts of the 1000+ page manuscript and 10 years to complete, finally being published in 1936. It was an immediate success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and vaulting Mitchell into the national spotlight. Mitchell did not deal well with her fame and never published another novel, writing only non-fiction thereafter. However, I am grateful for the gift she has left us, as I feel it is one of the best books I have ever read.The novel is not about slavery, the Civil War, or the reconstruction that followed. It is about Scarlet O'Hara, daughter of a determined and hard-headed Irish father and a refined Southern mother while the aforementioned events unfold around her. She is introduced to us as a spoiled, narcissistic 17 year old living at Tara, a cotton plantation in Georgia, at the outset of the Civil War. Scarlet spends her time seeing how many beaus she can attract, and with her great beauty she has little difficulty in attracting nearly every eligible bachelor in the county. Once she has them under her spell, she can toy with their emotions at her leisure, a trait that will ultimately lead to her downfall. It is Ashley Wilkes, blonde-haired golden boy from nearby Twelve Oaks plantation, that Scarlet has set her sights on, and it is this infatuation that will guide her actions throughout the remainder of the novel. I suppose this could be considered a love story, although it is unlike any love story I have ever read (not that I've read a lot.) Scarlet marries three times and none are for love. I imagine that was pretty common during the time frame of the novel, where arranged marriages were still accepted practices. Her first marriage was done to make Ashley jealous and the last two were for financial stability. Still, love is a theme that continues throughout, although it seems that none of the main characters have that love returned at an optimal time.Scarlet was hard to like at the beginning of the novel, so wrapped up in herself and uncaring of others feelings. She seemed incapable of understanding the motivations and feelings of others, or even herself at times. I had hopes that she would grow out of this as she matured, and in fact I did see signs as she cared for family and friends during the worst of times during the war and its aftermath. Scarlet did gain a sense of responsibility, and she didn't necessarily like it, complaining about it and wishing she didn't have it. In her core, she only cared about herself and any acts of kindness she showed were mere mirages that also benefited her. In the end, she reverted back to the girl we met at the beginning of the novel, sure that her beauty was all that mattered.I thought this was a fantastic read and gave an accurate snapshot into the time period depicted. It wasn't always pretty or politically correct in its portrayals of life during the war, but no matter how much we would like to, we cannot change what really happened back then. But I hope readers will not judge the book on what is perceived as racist activity. If we forget the past, then we are destined to repeat the mistakes of our society. And for all the heartbreak endured, the ending offered a glimmer of hope as Scarlet looks to Tara and the loving arms of Mammy. A solid 5 stars for me. This story will stay with me for quite some time.
    • 5/5
      This book is long (no doubt about it), but I loved it. The tale of Southern life during the Civil War and the Reconstruction really interested me.
    • 5/5
      This is a long book so I'm slowly making my way through it. I recently saw the movie which was my maternal grandma's fave movie and that wet my appetite to read this book. It's a great read.
    • 5/5
      memorable, tragic love story a la Shakespeare
    • 4/5
      It's as racist as one would expect of a novel written in the South, in the '30s, about slave holders. But beneath that lies the depth of an American classic with an intricately complex heroine that is worthy of its place in Americana.
    • 5/5
      This was such a great book! It gave me a true picture of the South during that time period. I am so glad it has not be censored as I believe it is very important for future generations to be able to get a true feel of how the south looked upon slavery and the freedom of slaves. It explains so much to me the hatred of the North by the South (I'm a Northerner).
    • 4/5
      This was a holiday re-read, I escaped from feeling cold, miserable and ill into a book where people go off to war and are much colder, miserabler and iller, which did at least give me a sense of perspective.It's set in the south of America, and the black characters are all depressingly lazy / stupid / insert unhelpful racist characature here, and I won't defend that.But given that, the story! The fall from the sun dappled Edan of youth through the horrors of war. Scarlett, so spoiled and naive, but so full of grit and bravery, and her unknowing love. You hate her and love her all at once, and as the book takes her through tragedy after tragedy it breaks your heart...
    • 5/5
      WONDERFUL~
    • 4/5
      I was completely blown away by this novel, a truly epic and fantastic tale which increased my knowledge of the American Civil War and made me consider things in a new light, particularly the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, terrible for a history student I know but though aware of their occurrence in history I was unaware of their origins or their particular reasons for appearing!
      This book really did shock me, I really didn't have any idea what it was completely about and so took this classic on with a real interest. It was incredibly well written and the characters were astounding. Melly is a favourite, Ashley definitely is not. Towards the end Scarlett doesn't really do it for me either, I suppose that's the point, war corrupts and changes even the best of people.
      The romance between Scarlett and Rhett was brilliant, they are so perfect together that it's just such an outrage that they should end the book with them apart (although I secretly believe that wasn't truly the end for them, no doubt she would find a scheming way to get him back!)
      This novel, though chosen as a 'romantic fiction' really encompasses a whole choice of genres and is completely accessible to anyone willing to read a book of this size. Passionate, skilfully-written and a timeless love story with a twist, 'Gone with the Wind' is a book you can certainly sink your teeth into.
    • 5/5
      A great read, never boring. The last great novel by someone who actually lived during the civil war/reconstruction era. Romantic soap opera is not what i usually read, but this is magnificent.
    • 5/5
      No one has every done a more thorough study of two stupid people cheating themselves out of happiness. An exercise in frustration - if only one thing had gone differently. Is any book so romantic, and yet so unsatisfying? Every teenage girl thinks, "If only I can fall in love like that someday. And not ruin everything, the way Scarlett and Rhett did." It's preliminary coaching for a life of romantic musings - Does Rhett really give a damn after all? Is too late ever really just too late?
    • 3/5
      Unfortunately, it's one of those novels that tells an interesting story, but doesn't hold up under a second reading. The characters are flat, the writing less than stellar.
    • 3/5
      A Book Your Mom LovesMore so than many other novels written during less progressive times, Gone With The Wind (GWTW) requires a modern reader to overlook or at least endure descriptions, dialogue and narrator commentary that would prevent its publication today. I plead ignorance regarding Margaret Mitchell beyond the dust jacket's contention that she wasn't aware the South lost the war until age ten because, despite her extensive second-hand exposure to the War, no one bothered to tell her that part of the story. So it's possible that she doesn't share her narrator's biased attitudes, and that she would describe the experience of plantation life for slaves in harsher terms than is presented in the book. Whether that's true or not, if you're going to appreciate GWTW, you're going to have to set aside your enlightened viewpoints and at least tolerate long passages of annoying dialect, free usage of the n-word (although only in dialogue and inner monologue) and the prejudiced editorializing of the book's narrator. I'm afraid in the end I failed in that effort.Mitchell paints an unrealistic picture when she writes of the Southerners' dismay at Northerners repeated inquiries about blood hounds and whippings as though these things never occurred or shares the Southerners' belief that life was better as a slave than free. If she had presented a neutral picture, GWTW would have been a stronger book. Instead, it reads somewhat as a rebuttal to Uncle Tom's Cabin.Setting that aside, Scarlett O'Hara is not a likable character and GWTW is ultimately not a redemption story. Yes, Scarlett realizes at the end that her obsessive love for Ashley has been a chimera and that if she had won him early on she would have discarded him the way she did all her other beaux. But she does nothing with this realization, she simply retreats to Tara after Rhett's abandonment and puts off dealing with her altered reality until tomorrow, when she will find a way to win him back. To be honest, she doesn't seem capable of many of the realizations she has over the course of the book.And GWTW is a long, rambling book. It covers over a decade of Scarlett's life, at times in slow, repetitive and mundane detail (the opening scenes, while needed to build our understanding of Scarlett, take entirely too long getting through one day). Other times, it rushes through a catastrophic event, then skips days or weeks ahead (Scarlett's fall down the stairs and Bonnie's death feel especially rushed). I don't know whether we're supposed to like Scarlett, but the other characters do a poor job of providing an alternative object for our sympathy. Rhett earns sympathy for the high price he pays for loving Scarlett, but he's squanders it on his disreputable business dealings. His noble deeds and kind treatment of most people aren't enough to overcome his character flaws. Ashley is simply weak and ineffectual; there is nothing admirable about him. Melanie is said to be a great lady but she's blind to both Scarlett and her husband's true characters, making her a fool. Combined they are a portrait of dysfunctional adults in an often unbelievable story of an unscrupulous woman looking out only for herself in the aftermath of the War. Understandable behavior, yes; honorable, hardly.I have been meaning to read GWTW for some time, and I'm glad I did. But it's not a book I'd read again.
    • 4/5
      GWTW, the great American epic, certainly earns its reputation by being a big sweeping novel of the collapse and rebuilding of the American south. Mitchell’s research about the many battles in and around Atlanta is evident, as is her knowledge of Southern plantation and urban life. But despite all of her research, her personal bias is evident and clouds her recounting of history. Mitchell is a product of her times, Southern born and bred 70 years after the civil war. She believes that slavery was not so bad, and the slaves were treated like family and were protected and cared for. Her descriptions of free slaves in Atlanta makes one cringe, and she devotes half of chapter 37 to this narrative with quotes like, “There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects…” Another of her characters, Big Sam, a former slave on Tara has tried freedom and doesn’t like it and is trying to make his way back to Tara where he knows he will be cared for again. Nowhere in the book does Mitchell make reference to the hard and inhumane lives slaves lived, and the fact that they were property with no rights or lives they could call their own. She even tries to justify the existence of the KKK, saying that the free blacks were running so amuck over of the whites that the Southern men, who had been stripped of their rights by the Yankees, had to do something to avenge these wrongs.

      Putting aside all of Mitchell’s personal bias about slavery, I did enjoy this book and ultimately felt it was a many layered love story between Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, and Ashley, all intertwined in matters of the heart. Scarlett, the central character and most interesting by far, is a modern woman ahead of her time. She is outspoken, strong-willed and a shrewd business woman. She does whatever it takes to get what she wants in affairs of business and the heart. She is a fully developed character with a range of emotions from pride and pettiness to compassion and understanding (although she tends to lean more toward the former emotions). At times we thoroughly dislike her, others we can relate to her, sometimes we pity her and occasionally we even cheer for her. Mitchell also spends time developing her other major characters, Rhett, Melanie and Ashley, and by the end we feel as if we really know all of them.

      Despite its 1,000 pages or 41 hours on audio cd, which I listened to, I never got bored, and in fact didn’t want to end. The story always moved right along. Someone was always dying, getting married, having a baby, going to or planning a party, plotting, scheming, or getting into or out of trouble. It is melodrama at its best and I am so glad I actually read it instead of just seeing the abridged story in the form of the movie.
    • 5/5
      Oh wow!! I was utterly and completely engrossed with this book. Mitchell did an incredible job on being very descriptive of everything. As I read I can really picture the scenery, the characters, and the war especially. Scarlet annoyed me and it was devastating how selfish, cruel, and cold hearted she was. Nevertheless, I couldn't put the book down. I was interested to see on what would become of her and Rhett, and Melanie and Ashley. The ending was a tear jerker for me especially for what happened to Melanie. The author did well on creating so much depth into this novel. Don't be intimidated by the long and many pages of this book. It was worth reading.
    • 3/5
      This book.... I loved 30% of it, sort-of-liked another 40%, and hated the last 30%.

      Every now and again there is a character you admire for their "gumption" even if they are shallow/practical/selfish, you still admire and respect and sort-of-love them. To me, that was Scarlett O'Hara. There were parts of this book where Scarlett was so passionate and wild and refreshing and admirable... but by the end I lost respect for her, and she seemed like a whiny, cruel brat.

      And everything was very unsatisfying. There were some awesome, cheeky & sarcastic romantic scenes between Scarlett & Rhett but the relationship never reaches a crescendo, its promise is never really fulfilled. I feel like there was a big chunk missing from their romance. It began and ended in the right places, but in the middle it got really muddled.

      And the ideology of the book, from a modern perspective, was incredibly jarring. I don't know Margaret Mitchell's politics- if she was incredibly dumb or incredibly clever in a subtle way, and I'm not sure I want to know. And the book rambles and repeats its ideology to the nth degree.

      Some happenings at the end of the book seemed like cheap trashy drama, which was disappointing. Like the book was trying to manipulate me into feeling emotion because I'd lost most of my interest in Scarlett.

      If this book were rewritten, and tweaked just a little bit, I would have loved it. I did love it and get thrills from it for a while, and now I wonder where it all wend wrong. I had a similar feeling from Tess of the d'Ubervilles, which sort of scarred me a little, and I think this will too. That lack of trust in an author is kind of sad.

    • 3/5
      Complicated feelings with this one, both in reading it and how to review it. I don’t know that I’ve ever wavered so much on a star rating, in many ways this is five stars, but other aspects have me uneasy about giving it such a wholehearted recommendation.This is most definitely a page-turner, which can’t be said of many books over a thousand pages long, it’s epic and yet intimately character driven, I get why it won a Pulitzer, I get why it made PBS’s 100 last year, and why it’s been on other favorite lists for decades. As appealing as I sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) found Rhett to be, and though its engrossing in train wreck fashion (Scarlett is so smart in some ways and so oblivious in all the Ashley ways), the romantic entanglements tended to be of less importance to me than the women on their own. Her racist views aside (I’ll address those momentarily), Scarlett felt very much ahead of her time. She’s ruthlessly and sometimes corruptly ambitious, she’s more obsessed with building an empire than being a mother, and she’s quite willing to break societal rules, including coveting a married man. While many of Scarlett’s choices would not be my own, I love that she just is who she is and is mostly unapologetic about it, there are plenty of male characters in pop culture unconcerned with their likability, but it’s far less common for female characters, so weirdly, a book from the thirties, managed to feel refreshing in that respect. I also found it interesting to spend time on the losing side of a war, and loved that rather than it being so much about men running to the rescue and rebuilding, it’s more often these two women who pick up the pieces for their families, figuring out how to survive. Scarlett with her schemes, and Melanie leading with her heart, each, in her own way, proves emotionally stronger than any man in the story. But, there’s also the cringe-worthy dialect for every black character, and consistently referring to them as stupid and lazy and like they need white people’s guidance or they just wouldn’t know what to do, not to mention all the other horrifying descriptors that I don’t want to mention. Obviously there’s a context to this, the book is told from the confederate south’s point of view, so racism isn’t unexpected and it wouldn’t be an honest depiction of that time and this particular set of white people if it pretended they weren’t racist. There’s also the fact that this wasn’t written in our more politically correct era so it couldn’t be handled with the delicacy that maybe (big maybe) the author might have used now, but even when you read with those caveats in mind, no caveat makes it comfortable to read ignorant, hateful things for page after page. Sometimes I questioned why I would read a book with such problematic content, but at the same time I wondered, is it really better to to only read point of views you agree with, to only read about things that don’t make you angry or sad? Should we only read books where everyone is depicted as equals and treated fairly even though the world is still so far from that ideal? Or, is there maybe some value in reading challenging things that sting your heart and soul and compel you to stop and think, really stop and think about how it must feel to actually be on the receiving end of such hatred and disrespect, not just page after page, but day after day? I continuously went back and forth about all of that in my head throughout the reading of Gone With The Wind and I still have no idea if there is a correct answer. Just, if you're going to read it, and it certainly is worth reading, it's this impressive achievement in storytelling, but brace for how offensive it also is.
    • 5/5
      A thrilling story with deeply flawed and realistic characters. Extremely enjoyable and revealing. Mitchell manages to weave a yarn full of poignant events, some more historical and others more fictional, skillfully into an epic of masterful proportions.
    • 5/5
      What a novel. What a story.

      It's long, but it's 100% worth the journey. The ending is absolutely phenomenal, and one of the best I have ever read. It's the type of book I everyone should read and experience, because there really is nothing quite like it. The characters are so unlikable, yet you can't help but root for them, even as they never learn. It's easy to fall in love with them too, and easy to cry over the love that could have-- and should have-- been. I love how the historical aspect is incorporated into the story not simply as a backdrop, but as a significant part of the romance being told. It's a fantastic novel and definitely one of a kind.