GONE WITH THE WIND, written by Margaret Mitchell and published in 1936, is 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 is sometimes considered to be the greatest novel and feature film of all time in the history of American literature and films. It was also adapted during the 1970s into a stage musical titled Scarlett. There is also a 2008 musical stage adaptation in London's West End titled Gone With The Wind.

This book 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. Over the years, the novel has also been analyzed for its symbolism and treatment of mythological archetypes.

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

The title is taken from the first line of the third stanza of the poem Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae by Ernest Dowson: "I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind."

The novel's protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, also uses the title phrase in a line of dialogue in the book. When her hometown is overtaken by the Yankees, she wonders if her home, a plantation called Tara, is still standing, or if it was "also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia".

Characters

Butler household

Scarlett O'Hara – protagonist, willful and spoiled Southern belle. Scarlett will do anything to keep her land and get what she wants.
Rhett Butler – Scarlett's love interest and third husband, often publicly shunned for scandalous behavior, sometimes accepted for his charm. He is portrayed as the perfect man.
Wade Hampton Hamilton – Scarlett and Charles Hamilton’s shy, timid son.
Ella Lorena Kennedy – Scarlett and Frank Kennedy’s homely daughter.
Eugenie Victoria "Bonnie Blue" Butler – Scarlett and Rhett's pretty, beloved, pampered daughter.
Note: In the movie, Scarlett didn't have any children with her first two husbands. The only child she had was Bonnie with Rhett Butler.

Wilkes household

Ashley Wilkes – the man Scarlett loves, Melanie's husband, a dreamer and a gentleman.
Melanie Hamilton Wilkes – Ashley's wife and second cousin, a true lady. Called "mealy-mouth" by Scarlett, but she quietly has a backbone of steel.
Beau Wilkes – Melanie's and Ashley's lovable son, delivered by Scarlett.
India Wilkes – Ashley's sister. Almost engaged to Stuart Tarleton, she bitterly hates Scarlett for stealing his attention before he is killed at Gettysburg. Lives with Aunt Pittypat after Scarlett marries Rhett and moves out.
Honey Wilkes – boy-crazy sister of India and Ashley. Originally "intended" to marry Charles Hamilton until Scarlett marries him.
John Wilkes- Owner of Twelve Oaks Plantation and patriarch of the Wilkes family

O'Hara household

Mammy – Scarlett's nurse from birth; a slave. Cited by Rhett as "the real head of the household."
Gerald O'Hara – Scarlett's fiery Irish father.
Ellen O'Hara – Scarlett's beloved mother, of aristocratic French ancestry, a true southern lady.
Suellen O'Hara – Scarlett's younger sister, whiny and lazy.
Carreen O'Hara – Scarlett's youngest sister, gentle and kind.
Pork – first and loyal slave of Gerald O'Hara.
Dilcey – Pork's wife, purchased from Twelve Oaks.
Prissy – slave daughter of Dilcey, silly and foolish.
Rosa – Upstairs slave maid.
Teena – Upstairs slave maid.
Jack – Dining room slave servant.
Big Sam – Overseer and slave; rescues Scarlett in Shantytown.

Other characters

Charles Hamilton – Melanie's brother, Scarlett's first husband, shy and loving.
Frank Kennedy – Suellen's former beau, Scarlett's second husband, an older man who only wants peace and quiet.
Belle Watling – prostitute; Rhett is her friend and loyal customer.
Jonas Wilkerson – former overseer of Tara, father of Emmie Slattery's illegitimate baby.
Emmie Slattery – later wife of Jonas Wilkerson.
Will Benteen – Confederate soldier who seeks refuge at Tara and eventually stays on to help with the plantation, in love with Carreen but marries Suellen.
Aunt Pittypat Hamilton – Charles’ and Melanie’s vaporish aunt who lives in Atlanta.
Uncle Peter – Aunt Pittypat's houseman and driver.
Archie – Scarlett's driver and protector, former convict.

Setting

Tara Plantation – The O'Hara home and plantation.
Twelve Oaks – The Wilkes plantation.
Peachtree Street – location of Aunt Pittypat's home in Atlanta, where much of the book takes place, and site of Scarlett and Rhett's own large home.

Politics

The book includes a vivid description of the fall of Atlanta in 1864 and the devastation of war (some of that aspect was missing from the 1939 film). The novel showed considerable historical research. According to her biography, Mitchell herself was ten years old before she learned that the South had lost the war. Mitchell's sweeping narrative of war and loss helped the book win the Pulitzer Prize on May 3, 1937.

An episode in the book dealt with the early Ku Klux Klan. In the immediate aftermath of the War, Scarlett is assaulted by poor southerners living in shanties, whereupon her former black slave Big Sam saves her life. In response, Scarlett's male friends attempt to make a retaliatory nighttime raid on the encampment. Northern soldiers try to stop the attacks, and Rhett helps Ashley, who is shot, to get help through his prostitute friend Belle. Scarlett's husband Frank is killed. This raid is presented sympathetically as being necessary and justified, while the law-enforcement officers trying to catch the perpetrators are depicted as oppressive Northern occupiers.

Although the Klan is not mentioned in that scene (though Rhett tells Archie to burn the "robes"), the book notes that Scarlett finds the Klan abominable. She believed the men should all just stay at home (she wanted both to be petted for her ordeal and to give the hated Yankees no more reason to tighten martial law, which is bad for her businesses). Rhett is also mentioned to be no great lover of the Klan. At one point, he said that if it were necessary, he would join in an effort to join "society". The novel never explicitly states whether this drastic step was necessary in his view. The local chapter later breaks up under the pressure from Rhett and Ashley.

Scarlett expresses views that were common of the era. Some examples:

"How stupid negroes were! They never thought of anything unless they were told." — Scarlett thinks to herself, after returning to Tara after the fall of Atlanta.
"How dared they laugh, the black apes!...She'd like to have them all whipped until the blood ran down...What devils the Yankees were to set them free!" — Scarlett again thinking to herself, seeing free blacks after the war.
However, she is kind to Pork, her father's trusted manservant. He tells Scarlett that if she were as nice to white people as she is to black, a lot more people would like her.
She almost loses her temper when the Yankee women say they would never have a black nurse in their house and talk about Uncle Peter, Aunt Pittypat's servant, as if he were a mule.

Inspirations

Because several elements of Gone with the Wind have parallels with Margaret Mitchell's own life, her experiences may have provided some inspiration for the story in context. Mitchell's understanding of life and hardship during the American Civil War, for example, came from elderly relatives and neighbors passing war stories to her generation.

While Margaret Mitchell used to say that her Gone with the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in Mitchell's own life as well as to individuals she knew or she heard of. Mitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, was born in 1845. She was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, who owned a large plantation on Tara Road in Clayton County, south of Atlanta, and who married an American woman named Ellen, and had several children, all daughters.

Many researchers believe that the physical brutality and low regard for women exhibited by Rhett Butler was based on Mitchell's first husband, Red Upshaw. She divorced him after she learned he was a bootlegger amid rumors of abuse and infidelity.

After a stay at the plantation called The Woodlands, and later Barnsley Gardens, Mitchell may have gotten the inspiration for the dashing scoundrel from Sir Godfrey Barnsley of Adairsville, Georgia.

Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, the mother of US president Theodore Roosevelt may have been an inspiration for Scarlett O'Hara. Roosevelt biographer David McCullough discovered that Mitchell, as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal, conducted an interview with one of Martha's closest friends and bridesmaid, Evelyn King Williams, then 87. In that interview, she described Martha's physical appearance, beauty, grace, and intelligence in detail. The similarities between Martha and the Scarlett character are striking.

George Trenholm as Historical Basis for Rhett Butler.

It made international news in 1989 when Dr. E. Lee Spence, an underwater archaeologist and shipwreck expert from Charleston, South Carolina, announced his discovery that Margaret Mitchell had actually taken much of her compelling story of love, greed and war from real life and that Mitchell had actually based most of Rhett Butler on the life of George Alfred Trenholm. Like Rhett, Trenholm was a tall, handsome, shipping magnate from Charleston, South Carolina, and made millions of dollars from blockade running. Both the real life Trenholm and the fictional Rhett were accused of making off with much of the Confederate treasury and were thrown in prison after the Civil War where they were visited by a beautiful woman with a "fast" reputation. Spence's literary discovery that had its roots in his prior discoveries of some of Trenholm's wrecked blockade runners made international news.

In his book, Treasures of the Confederate Coast: The "Real Rhett Butler" and Other Revelations, Dr. Spence reveals what the editors of Life magazine called "overwhelming evidence" that shipping and banking magnate George Trenholm was the historical basis for Mitchell's romantic sea captain. Spence's book gives a compelling case that Mitchell had falsely claimed Rhett was pure fiction.

Symbolism

Over the past years, the novel Gone with the Wind has also been analyzed for its symbolism and mythological treatment of archetypes. Scarlett has been characterized as a heroic figure struggling and attempting to twist life to suit her own wishes. The land is considered a source of strength, as in the plantation Tara, pronounced almost the same as the Latin word terra, meaning the land.

Some Trivia

In the scene where Scarlett digs up a turnip and then retches and gives her "As God As My Witness" speech, the retching noices were actually coming from Olivia de Havilland, since Vivien Leigh could not produce a convincing enough retch.

In the scene where Rhett pours Mammy a drink after the birth of Bonnie, as a joke, he poured real whisky into the decanter instead of the normal tea that was used as a substitute for liquer back then. Hattie McDaniel did not know this until she took a swig. Then her eyes got red and watery as she froze. The entire crew started to laugh.

1,000 dummies were used to augment live extras in the scene where Scarlett goes searching for Dr. Meade.

There are 1,037 pages in the original book and 500,000 words.

The scene where Scarlett was stretching and singing to herself after the night on the stairs, there is a tray next to her. The tray was there before Mammy got upstairs. This was because before they deleted the scene, there was a short moment in which Bonnie brings Scarlett the tray.

The original name for Scarlett O'Hara was Pansy O'Hara. The original names for Melanie were Permelia and Melisanda. And the original name for Tara was Fountenoy Hall

The final cost of GWTW was a record $4.25 Million.

CBS paid $35 million dollars to air GWTW on television. It was the largest sum of money ever paid in the history of television.

Clark Gable insisted that his wardrobe be thrown out and redone by his own personal tailor.

One of the considered titles for GWTW was Ba! Ba! Blacksheep.

After Scarlett kills the Yankee deserter, Melanie has to remove her gown to wrap around his bloody head. Rumors spread all over the set that she wore nothing underneath it, and all of a sudden, the entire crew was in the room where they were filming that part. But excitement turned to dissapointment when they saw that she had put a slevelesss blouse on and a pair of pants that she rolled up to her knees.

As a prank on Clark Gable, some stagehands sewed on 70 lbs. of weights onto Olivia de Havillands skirt. Clark was supposed to lift her from the bed and carry her down to the wagon to flee out of Atlanta. As Clark struggled to pick her up under the unexpected weight, he had asked if they nailed her to the floor.

In the scene where Rhett, Scarlett, Melanie, Prissy, and Baby Beau are fleeing Atlanta, the horse that Rhett steals was supposed to be thin and its ribs were to be sticking out. When they finally found the right horse, weeks later when they began filming, the horse had grown too fat and its ribs were no longer showing. Since there was no time to hire a replacement, the make up department painted dark shadows where the ribs were supposed to be sticking out.

The film sequence that is commonly know as "The Burning of Atlanta", was not the actual burning of the city by General Sherman in November of 1864, but instead it represents the night, two months earlier, when the retreating Confederate Army torched its ammunition dumps to keep the Union Army from capturing them.

5,000 gallon water taks were used that night to put out the fire after the filming of that scene was finished.

In June of 1936, Gone With the Wind hit the stands in bookstores. It was a hard cover book and the price was $3.00, where today it is $10.00 just to get a paperback copy.

Gone With the Wind sold 50,000 copies a day within the first six months.

One month after the book was published, producer, David O. Selznick, bought the film rights for $50,000. At that time, that was the highest sum of money ever paid for an authors' first novel.

On November 8, 1971, Maragret Mitchell became the first woman ever to be admitted to Georgia's Hall of Fame. It was a posthumous honor, the author had died in 1949.

Stagehands placed percusive caps beneath the boards of sets under construction. When a workman nailing the boards struck them with the hammer, the caps exploded. The crew in on the gag then burst into screams of "The Yankees is coming!"

To while away the time between takes, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh retreated to a corner of the set to play games. He taught her how to play Backgammon and she taught him how to play Battleship, a naval war game of skill and strategy. Time after time, Vivien Leigh soundly trounced Clark Gable at both of the games.

This guide was assembled by booksuncommon.  Any errors are mine. For those I apologize.

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