Gone With the Wind is a phenomenon built on contradictions. It has been disparaged by critics over time as artistically flimsy, strong on emotion yet weak in morality, factual but not necessarily historical, mythic but not literary, good but not great. Yet it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Although it was the product of a first-time novelist who never wrote another book (and a woman at that, something critics often noted), it broke the publishing records of its day and has become the most popular American novel of all time, with 28 million copies sold to date, second only to the Bible in hardcover sales. James Boatwright, writing in the New Republic, called Gone With the Wind "not so much a book as a literary Act of God, unexplainable but cataclysmically there...."
Atlanta, Through and Through
It is no wonder that Margaret Mitchell wrote the book that she did. She was born in Atlanta almost 100 years ago, in 1900, and lived her whole life there, in a city and a region immersed in the historical, economic, political, and racial legacies of America's then-not-too-distant Civil War.
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