Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was first published in 1936 and is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, Georgia, during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed. It opens in April 1861, on the eve of secession, at Tara, the plantation of the Irish-born Gerald O'Hara. Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest of his three daughters, sixteen years old and used to parties and suitors, and she learns at the start that Ashley Wilkes, the neighbour she has set her heart on, is about to be engaged to his cousin Melanie Hamilton.

The novel follows Scarlett through the war and after it, including the fall of Atlanta and the effects in Georgia of Sherman's march to the sea, as she works to hold on to the family land and to recover the position she was born into. It is a coming-of-age story built on a large cast of family, neighbours and townspeople whose circumstances are steadily overturned, and the title is taken from a line in Ernest Dowson's poem beginning Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.

Gone with the Wind was the only novel Mitchell published, and it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction following its appearance in 1936.