Required Reading

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

I’m sure that everyone (almost) has had a chance to watch the movie version of this novel; if you haven’t, I don’t know where the hell you’ve been, but you should watch it. Gone With The Wind is Margaret Mitchell’s only novel. Published in 1936, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and in 1939 it was turned into a movie. The book is pretty massive, but I read it in one day. I couldn’t put it down. When it originally published, one of the reviewers wrote that it is “the shortest long novel I have ever read.” Mitchell made sure to make it an easy read, saying that she wrote it so a five year old could read it.

Set during the Civil War, the novel follows Scarlett O’Hara as her life gets turned inside out during the war. If you’ve seen the movie, it stays pretty close to the novel, but it really doesn’t compare. The book is better.

The novel often gets called out for it’s racism and sexism, but holy shit, look at when it was written and when it takes place, not to even mention where it takes place. Don’t you think, given the real history of it all, that these themes would somehow not appear in a novel that was written about the Civil War? Consider this: Gone With The Wind has sold more copies than the Bible and is one of the best-selling novels of all time.

Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet and dancing slippers, had slipped away, and there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage, except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

This is part of the Required Reading series, which should be considered more recommendation than requirement.