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Book Review: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Author: Margaret Mitchell

Publisher: Macmillan Inc.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance

First Publication: 1936

Language:  English

Major Characters: Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, Gerald O’Hara, Ellen O’Hara, Mammy, Frank Kennedy, Charles Hamilton

Setting Place: Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era

Theme: The Transformation of Southern Culture, Overcoming Adversity with Willpower, Survival

Book Summary: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War, Margaret Mitchell’s magnificent historical epic is an unforgettable tale of love and loss, of a nation mortally divided and a people forever changed. Above all, it is the story of beautiful, ruthless Scarlett O’Hara and the dashing soldier of fortune, Rhett Butler.

Margaret Mitchell’s monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 80 years after its initial publication, its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and the most beloved work by an American writer…

Despite boasts that Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is “the greatest romance of our time,” this approximately 1,000-page book is not just a romance. Its intense focus on a ruthless heroine neatly underscores what this brick of a book is instead: an exploration of transformation, loss, and the deep unfairness of life. Perhaps no story can do more justice to these themes–more memorably and, ultimately, devastatingly–than this, Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece.

There’s little happiness in Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, something that surprised me even though before beginning I was aware it’s a complex book. Neither heroine Scarlett O’Hara nor Rhett Butler are likable people; their relationship is an unhealthy one, with Butler abusing O’Hara after they marry. It’s the Civil War that hoards the spotlight. This war backdrop, as is true of all war backdrops , lends the story an important gravitas and drama; however, this same backdrop infuses Gone With the Wind with an undercurrent of hopelessness, and an all-encompassing hopelessness it is.

“Hardships make or break people.”

To say that everything hinges on the war backdrop wouldn’t be exaggerating; the war affects each character profoundly, providing the meaning behind their most significant actions. It’s the narrative’s very life force. Margaret Mitchell put a human face on this war that’s remarkable, and her gruesome (but not gratuitously so) descriptions strike all the right emotional chords at just the right intensity.

She impressively juxtaposed the war’s atrocities with Scarlett O’Hara’s superficial frets; this young woman shamelessly laments her lack of stylish dresses while just a few miles away men lie bleeding to death in cramped hospitals without benefit of painkillers. Scarlett O’Hara most certainly is a fearless woman with a strong independent streak, but she’s easy to despise. She’s not so unlikable though. This protagonist is utterly captivating, someone who held me spellbound, much as she does the many characters she manipulates.

“Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”

Gone With the Wind isn’t really about Scarlett O’Hara, though, as compelling as she is. The book’s power lies in part on Margaret Mitchell’s spin on the theme of transformation; Scarlett is merely the character she used to drive home that theme. In the world of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, not all personal transformations are for the better. Margaret Mitchell’s creation isn’t the syrupy maudlin type with inspirational characters turning over a new leaf by story’s end.

This isn’t to say that no one gets their comeuppance in due time or that no lessons are learned, but, like life itself, countless unfair events unfold. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell isn’t in the business of imparting happily-ever-afters. “The greatest romance of our time” is a surprisingly contemplative tale: real, deeply sad at times, and unafraid to reveal a great many of life’s uglier truths.

“After all, tomorrow is another day!”

Finally, I believe it’s worth mentioning that Gone With the Wind’s Southern sensibility is very strong. The South here is a living character all its own, and this vividness lends even deeper resonance to the story while breathing life into its large cast of characters. I know some have taken–and do take–issue with the Georgia of this era, when slavery and sexism were very much a reality; however, it’s always clear that Mitchell’s goal was only authenticity and accuracy in portrayal, and she wasn’t expressing personal sentiments. Her Pulitzer Prize is well deserved.

Controversy:

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has been banned on social grounds . The book has been called “offensive” and “vulgar” because of the language and characterizations. Words like “damn” and “whore” were scandalous at the time. Also, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice disapproved of Scarlett’s multiple marriages. The term used to describe slaves was also offensive to readers. In more recent times, the membership of lead characters in the Ku Klux Klan is also problematic.

The book joins the ranks of other books that controversially tackled issues of race, including Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of Narcissus, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Buy Now: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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Gone With The Wind

Written by Margaret Mitchell Review by Andrea Connell

With this reissue of Gone with the Wind , I decided that it was time for me to finally read this Pulitzer Prize winning classic and see what all the fuss was about. I hadn’t seen the movie either, so this was going to be a clean slate affair for me.

Well, I am thankful that I read it. This book earns its reputation as one of America’s all time classics. This was the most multilayered, touching, and haunting depiction of war I have ever read. But it is not only about war and loss; it is about love, loyalty, bravery, and survival, and discovering too late what is really important in life.

This is an epic novel about the Confederacy. As a born and bred Northerner, I never understood the Southern point of view of the Civil War. Now, I do. I will always be grateful to this book for engaging my interest in the Civil War and opening my eyes to the Southern states’ suffering and their loss of an era.

On a literary level, Mitchell’s characters are fresh and alive, especially the detestable rogue turned doting father, Rhett Butler, the self-absorbed and determined Scarlett O’Hara, the loyal, sensitive, and saintly Melly Hamilton, and the stern yet loving Mammy. It was hard to find anything likable about Scarlett, a feeling I struggled with throughout the book. The same thought applied to Rhett, up until a certain point. There were enough likeable characters, on the other hand, to make up for that discomfort. But being forced to accept the characters as they truly are was one of the highlights of the novel. The book is HUGE (over 950 pages) and, for the most part, “unputdownable.” The book seems to have been well researched (at least from the Confederate viewpoint), and there are many descriptive details of battles, the burning of Atlanta and of the Georgian plantations, the plights of both slavery and emancipation, and the Reconstruction Era. I highly recommend this book, both for reading pleasure and for a poignant lesson in Civil War history.

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Stephen Robert Kuta

Author, Genealogist, Historian, Palaeographer, Blogger, Model and Amatuer Photographer

The 1936 New York Times Book Review of Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind  is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman’s destructive “March to the Sea”. This historical novel features a  Bildungsroman  or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson.

Packed with gallant and conventional dialogue

Gone with the Wind  was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Stephen and Yhana is the official You Tube channel for the author’s blogs and websites (Stephen Robert Kuta), a shared adventure with his daughter. Featuring: Days Out in the UK / History / Genealogy / Virtual Walks / Virtual Cycling / Travel and so much more. Feel free to visit, subscribe and watch out for all of our upcoming episodes.

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June 30, 1936 Books of the Times By RALPH THOMPSON Gone With the Wind By Margaret Mitchell argaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" (Macmillan, $3) is an outsized novel of Civil War and Reconstruction days in Georgia. It is, in all probability, the biggest book of the year: 1,037 pages. I found it -- well, it is best to delay the verdict for a few paragraphs. Only most unnatural of reviewers will give away his secret at the outset. Scarlett O'Hara grows up on the family plantation, a magnificent place. In April, 1861, she and her sisters wear hoped dresses; their scores of Negro slaves are lovable and happy. Yams drip with butter; plates overflow with golden-brown fried chicken. Young men who come to call are furnished with mint-juleps, and bear such given names as Stuart and Brent and Ashley and Boyd. They wear riding boots; their faces are sun burned; their eyes are merry and arrogant. Fine horseflesh they talk of, and the threatening war. "Why, honey, of course there's going to be a war!" cries Stuart; "the Yankees may be scared of us, but after the way General Beauregard shelled them out of Fort Sumter day before yesterday, they'll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world." Of course there is a war; Stuart and Brent and Ashley and Boyd rush off, and Scarlett weeps. The years go by, and as the Yankee blockade tightens, life on the O'Hara plantation loses much of its charm. When, toward the end, Sherman sweeps down on Atlanta, it seems as it things could never be any worse. But worse they are, once the war is over. The plantations are ruined, most of them, and the great planting families too. Scarlett must grub around for barely enough to keep her and the remaining O'Haras alive. The Scallawags Rule Then a fierce resolve comes over her, and while the Scallawags rule Georgia and Negroes sit in the Legislature, she violates all conventions of Southern womanhood. Green-eyed, unscrupulous and cruel, she goes into the lumber business, cheats, fights, drinks, consorts with the Yankee overlords and marries Rhett Butler, a notorious Scallawag rascal. When five or six years have elapsed and we see her for the last time, Scartlett has become what she had resolved so fiercely to be rich, secure and at the top of the heap. But she has not won happiness. "Gone With the Wind" is a historical romance. The happy ante-bellum days are light-opera in tone, packed with gallant and conventional dialogue (they'll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world") and conventional characters (darkies hummin, banjos strummin', hard-riding colonials, sallow Yankee overseers). The years of actual fighting, followed from behind the lines, are more realistically described, and the Reconstruction period is portrayed in terms that seem, at first sight, to be definitely unromantic. But the whole is really nor far removed from the moving picture called "The Birth of a Nation." This must be said despite the fact that Miss Mitchell becomes pretty outspoken at times. There is to her story a certain "vigor" and modernity; she allows her characters to vomit, utter oaths and allude to bodily functions. Scarlett, the heroine, is a vixen and a baggage; Rhett, the hero, is alternately a bounder and a gentleman. Such people are not commonly discovered in romantic stories. There is no happy ending, with the lovers, after repeated misunderstandings, re-united for ever and for aye. In certain portions of the dialogue the characters speak like realists; at one point, for instance, with Rhett explaining that outside countries will never help the Confederacy ("England never bets on the underdog. * * * And as for France, that weak imitation of Napoleon is far too busy establishing the French in Mexico to be bothered with us") the reader begins to feel that the author is about to get down to business. But a moment's consideration shows that Rhett was speaking not as a realist but with the benefit of twentieth century hindsight which is hardly fair. The Historical Background The historical background is the chief virtue of the book, and it is the story of the times rather than the unconvincing and somewhat absurd plot that gives Miss Mitchell s work whatever importance may be attached to it. How accurate this history is is for the expert to tell, but no reader can come away without a sense of the tragedy that overcame the planting families in 1865 and without a better understanding of the background of present of present-day Southern life. True enough, the same understanding can be had from any of a half dozen works of straight history (Claude Bowers's "The Tragic Era," for example), but that is neither here nor there. Miss Mitchell writes from no particular point of view, although now and then there glitters a dull rage at the upset that ended such a beautiful civilization and allowed Negroes for a time to "live in leisure while their former masters struggled and starved." (Herself a Georgian, born and raised in Atlanta, Miss Mitchell could hardly react otherwise.) The writing is always lively, and never distinguished. There are a good many questionable touches to the dialogue—the word "sissy" (implying an effeminate man) is put into the mouths of characters a whole generation too early, and such expressions as "on the make," "like a bat out of hell," "Gotterdammerung" and "survival of the fittest" sound very strange upon the tongues of Civil War Southerners. A First Novel But any kind of first novel of over 1,000 pages is an achievement, and for the research that was involved, and for the writing itself, the author of "Gone With the Wind" deserves due recognition. I happen to feel that the book would have been infinitely better had it been edited down to say, 500 pages but there speaks the harassed daily reviewer as well as the would-be judicious critic. Very nearly every reader will agree, no doubt, that a more disciplined and less prodigal piece of work would have more nearly done justice to the subject-matter. Return to the Books Home Page

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Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) has always been and probably will always be an unavoidable accident for most teenage girls. Immediate reactions are giddiness, a brief cardiac arrest or a shock to the entire nervous system. Permanent after effects lasting well into adulthood include delusion and denial accompanied by waves of nostalgia and sentimentality. Sometimes, there is debilitating blindness.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Gone with the Wind remains the defiant and politically incorrect “it” hit that never gets called literature even if it occasionally snags the title of “American Classic.” For critics, its message of land being “the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for – worth dying for” doesn’t hold a candle to the message of let’s all-learn-to-grow-up-and-be-fair in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Neither does Mitchell’s book have what it takes for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (published in the same year) to make it to University reading lists.

Like her lead characters, the shrewd Rhett Butler and the willful Scarlett O’Hara, it would appear that Mitchell frankly didn’t give a damn for her audience as she wrote her magnum opus pasted on the backdrop of the American Civil War. Mitchell maintains a perverse kind of honesty that indirectly roots for apartheid and exploitation (what else is the bid for saving a plantation and “a way of life” all about except eternal slave labour and white supremacy?) insisting on an alternate universe to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

Gone with the Wind is a historical fiction set in the American Civil war and has served as a reference point for many discussions on war, slavery, race, adaptation for survival, and values. Scarlett O’Hara is at the center of the story, a spoilt, rash teenager who is suddenly forced to face marriage, parenthood, widowhood, starvation, and poverty in quick succession and decides to do everything in her powers to find security from these struggles.

Gone with the Wind Spoiler Free Plot Summary

Scarlett O’Hara is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, she is the eldest of the three daughters of Gerald and Ellen O’Hara and is considered the belle of the county. All the eligible young men in her county are wrapped in her charms and she relishes the attention they shower on her. Despite having all the county boys wrapped around her fingers, Ashley Wilkes is the only young man in the county she is in love with, he has never professed love to her but she believes he secretly reciprocates her love because he is always courteous to her.

She becomes shocked when she hears that Ashley will soon announce his engagement to another girl, Melanie Wilkes, at a barbecue party the following day.

In her despair, she confides in her father who confirms the news of Ashley’s engagement but tells her that it is for the best because Ashley is not her type and can never make her happy. But she does not listen. She comforts herself with the thought that Melanie is not physically attractive and so, it would be easy to get Ashley to leave Melanie once she, Scarlett professes her love to him.

At the party, she charms and enchants all the boys present to make Ashley jealous but Ashley seems too engrossed with his conversation with Melanie to notice. Eventually, she finds Ashley alone and drags him to an empty study room where she professes her love to him and begs him to elope with her. Ashley does not give in and tells her he will go ahead and marry Melanie before he leaves the room.

Thinking she is alone, she throws a china piece against the fireplace in anger only to realize Rhett Butler, a stranger she had just met at the party and was told he is a scandalous rogue, had been lying quietly by the fireplace and had overheard her conversation with Ashley. However, Rhett promises her that her secret is safe with him and leaves.

Without thinking, she agrees to marry Charles Hamilton, Melanie’s brother to spite Ashley and everyone that was talking about her flirtatious behavior with men at the party. And this makes Scarlett and Melanie become sisters-in-law.

Scarlett’s marriage to Charles Hamilton is very short-lived because of the war. Charles departs to enlist in the army just two weeks after their wedding and dies two months later. Scarlett gives birth to a baby boy but has no interest in the baby, she spends her time feeling depressed and obsessing over Ashley who has also departed for war.  Not knowing the cause of her moody state, Scarlett’s parents send her to Atlanta to live with Melanie and her aunt in a bid to cheer her up.

Scarlett resents Melanie for marrying Ashley Wilkes but has to keep it a secret and live with her because they are now related by marriage. Only Rhett Butler who comes in and out of Scarlett’s life knows Scarlett’s true feelings.  Melanie on her part is a sweet person and shows Scarlett nothing but pure love and devotion. As both women struggle through the war together, Scarlett eventually learns that it is impossible not to admire and even love the pure spirit of Melanie.

Gone with the Wind Summary

Warning: This Summary contains Spoilers

Scarlett O’Hara is spending the afternoon in her country home with two handsome twins from the neighboring plantation Stuart and Brent Tarleton who are both enamored with her. The twins tell her about their latest expulsion from school and mention that going to school would be useless anyway because a war is coming. Scarlett does not believe the war will take place and dismisses the subject.

As a change of subject, the twins mention that they heard the news of Ashley Wilkes’s engagement to his cousin Melanie Wilkes which would be announced at a Barbecue party the following day. The news shocks Scarlett because she is in love with Ashley and thinks he is in love with her as well. She runs out of the house to await her father’s return in order to have a private discussion with him. When her father eventually returns and meets her, he confirms the news of Ashley’s engagement and upon sensing Scarlett’s heartbreak, tells her that Ashley is not good for her and promises to hand over their home called Tara to her.

Scarlett does not heed her father’s advice and concludes Ashley would elope with her once she professes her love to him at the barbecue party. At the party, she eventually talks to Ashley alone and professes her love to him but Ashley turns her down and insists he must marry Melanie. When Ashley leaves, she throws a temper tantrum and realizes Rhett Butler, a stranger with a bad reputation she had just met at the party, had overheard her conversation with Ashley but Rhett Butler promises to keep her secret.

Scarlett tries to quietly sneak back to the room where she was meant to nap with the other girls but overhears Honey Wilkes talking about how Scarlett throws herself at men. In anger, she storms out, thinking of a way to get back at everyone that has offended her in the county. Charles Hamilton a shy boy she was flirting with at the party, meets her in this state and without knowing what is wrong with her, asks her to marry him and because Charles Hamilton was expected to marry Honey Wilkes, Scarlett agrees to marry him as a way to get back at Honey.

Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton but he leaves to join the army just after two weeks and a report of his death comes after two months, leaving Scarlett a pregnant widow. Meanwhile, Ashley goes ahead to marry Melanie and also leaves to join the army.

Scarlett gives birth to a baby boy for late Charles after some months and they name him Wade Hampton. But she finds herself always feeling unhappy. Her parents sense she is unhappy and send her to Atlanta to live with her sister-in-law, Melanie, and their Aunt Pittypat as a way to cheer her up.

Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with Melanie and Aunt Pittypat. The bubble of the city cheers her up. Although the war has started, Atlanta is still safe and the war has not gotten to the city. Scarlett joins the social circle of Atlanta elite women in volunteer services for the Confederate soldiers. She is upset about the restrictions placed on her because of her widowhood. She attends a fundraising party in Atlanta and yearns to dance but is not bold enough to dance because widows are expected to desist from any public display of merriment. However, Rhett Butler comes to the party and asks her for the dance and she agrees.

While they dance, they catch up on old times and Scarlett learns that Rhett was making a fortune as a blockade runner. he tells her he thinks the war has no justification and that The South would lose the war. He also tells her he dislikes the demure dressing expected of her as a widow and promises to get her colorful dresses the next time he visits Atlanta. Dr. Meade announces that men would bid for a dance with the lady of their choice with money as a way to raise funds for the Confederacy and Rhett bids the highest amount of money to dance with Scarlett and this brings them the disapproval of the matrons of Atlanta.

Rhett Butler begins visiting Aunt Pittypat’s house often, he brings gifts for Aunt Pittypat, plays fondly with Scarlett’s son Wade and has long conversations with Scarlett whenever he is in Atlanta.

A few days to Christmas, Ashley gets a furlough from the army and visits the ladies in Aunt Pittypat’s home. The war has made him sober and melancholic but Scarlett still fancies herself in love with him. On the day Ashley is to return to the army Scarlett professes her love to Ashley again. Ashley tells Scarlett he loves her too but pleads with her to promise to take care of Melanie and Scarlett makes the promise before he leaves.

Shortly after Ashley leaves, Melanie announces that she is pregnant. The war comes closer to Atlanta and Scarlett longs to return to the safety of her country home, Tara but her promise to take care of Melanie and her mother’s letter informing her of a disease outbreak in Tara makes her stay back in Atlanta. News of Confederate soldiers reaches Atlanta and Ashley is declared missing, Scarlett also finds that many of her childhood friends and beaus have died in battle. Rhett promises Melanie that he would pull some strings to find out more about Ashley’s whereabouts and later relays to them that Ashley has been captured as a prisoner by the Union Army.

The war gets closer to Atlanta and Aunt Pittypat flees to Macon for safety, leaving Scarlett with Melanie whose pregnancy is almost due. Dr. Meade warns that Melanie is not fit to travel and would need special medical attention during her delivery. With the influx of injured soldiers that overpower the hospitals and the medics, Scarlett begins to worry about Melanie’s childbirth but her slave, Prissy assures her that she knows a lot about midwifery and this calms Scarlett’s anxieties.

Melanie goes into labor on the day war comes into Atlanta. Scarlett tries to fetch a doctor to help but the doctors are overwhelmed with treating injured soldiers and cannot spare the time to come; all of their neighbors have fled for safety and no one is around to help, then Prissy at this point confesses that she had been lying about knowing how to be a midwife and Scarlett is forced to handle Melanie’s childbirth alone.

Eventually, Melanie delivers a baby boy safely but they are forced to flee Atlanta before she can regain her strength because the city is burning. Scarlett sends Prissy to fetch Rhett to assist them in fleeing. Rhett steals a scrawny-looking horse and comes to help them flee Scarlett, Melanie, Prissy, Wade, and Melanie’s newborn baby flee Atlanta.

At the outskirts of Atlanta, Rhett changes his mind and tells Scarlett he is leaving them to join the army. Scarlett is furious with him but Rhett does not change his mind, he gives her a passionate kiss, and tells her he loves her. Scarlett tells Rhett she wishes him dead for deserting them and continues on her journey to Tara while Rhett runs off into the burning city.

The journey to Tara is very wearisome for Scarlett– Melanie is unconscious, the newborn baby is weak, Prissy and Wade are frightened and everyone is thirsty and hungry– but she comforts herself with the hope of meeting her mother Ellen. As she rides into Clayton County, Scarlett finds many of the homes and plantations she knew from childhood in ruins and it makes her wonder if her home Tara is in ruins as well.

When they eventually reach their plantation, Scarlett is relieved that their home Tara is still standing but the situation in Tara is not what she had hoped for–her mother is dead, her two sisters are very sick, her father is losing his mind to grief and all their slaves have left except Mammy, Pork and Dilcey.

Dilcey has a newborn baby and because Melanie has no breast milk, Dilcey nurses her baby and Melanie’s baby on her own breasts.

Scarlett takes up the responsibility of running the household, assigning work, and giving instructions to everyone in the household. Soon, things begin to stabilize and they can pull meager meals together for the household. Then one day a lone Yankee thief comes to rob Tara but Scarlett kills him, Melanie comes out and finds out, together they search the dead thief and take all the valuables in his possession, Melanie urges Scarlett to hurry and bury the thief while she cleans up the bloodstains before anyone finds out.

Uncle Peter visits Tara with a letter from Ashley saying he is alive and they all begin to expect his return. Meanwhile, an injured soldier is brought to Tara and they nurse him back to health, they find out his name is Will Benteen and with time, he begins to assist Scarlett with work and in running the household.

Eventually, Ashley returns to Tara from being a war prisoner and it is an emotional moment for everyone in the household, especially Melanie and Scarlett.

The war is over and the state is in the control of a new government. Scarlett and Will Benteen have worked hard and Tara is among the more fortunate surviving plantations in Clayton County. Jonas Wilkerson, a former plantation overseer at Tara who was dismissed for getting a girl pregnant out of wedlock, is now at the helm of affairs in government and he connives to impose an exorbitant tax on Tara in a bid to render the O’Hara’s bankrupt and acquire the plantation for himself.

Scarlett is determined not to lose Tara and travels to Atlanta with hopes of manipulating Rhett Butler into giving her money for the taxes. She gets to Atlanta and discovers Rhett is in prison awaiting a murder trial. She puts on a facade of prosperity and visits him in prison, she tries to seduce him in exchange for the money but Rhett sees through her facade after almost falling for it. He tells her he cannot help her because his money is at risk of being confiscated by the government if it is discovered.

Scarlett leaves the prison in despair at the thought of losing Tara. She runs into Frank Kennedy, a man that has indicated an interest in marrying her sister Suellen and upon realizing he is wealthy, she lies to him that Suellen has gotten engaged to another man. Scarlett seduces him and manipulates him into marrying her within a short time. From him, she gets the money to pay the tax and secure Tara.

While married to Frank Kennedy, Scarlett begins to look into his business and realizes his business is not well managed. Frank Kennedy is displeased that Scarlett is business inclined but Scarlett easily bullies him and gets her way. Frank Kennedy mentions his plans to acquire a sawmill but complains that his debtors are not paying up.

Scarlett runs into Rhett again, he has been acquitted of the charges against him and is free. They have a conversation and Scarlett asks him for a loan to start a business of her own and Rhett Butler gives her the loan. With the loan, Scarlett acquires the sawmill herself and makes a profitable business out of it to the dismay of her husband and society.

The news of Gerald O’Hara’s death reaches Scarlett and she travels to Tara from Atlanta. Will Benteen brings Scarlett up to speed on the things going on in Tara as he picks her up from the station. Will wants to marry Suellen, Careen wants to join a convent, and the entire county blames Suellen for her father’s death.

After Gerald O’Hara’s funeral, Ashley tells Scarlett of his plans to leave Tara and travel to New York with Melanie and their baby. Scarlett does not want Ashley to be far from her so she offers to employ him to manage one of her sawmills in Atlanta, and when he refuses her offer, she manipulates Melanie into persuading Ashley to take it and Ashley gives in.

Melanie and Ashley return to Atlanta and get a small house of their own. Soon Melanie becomes the heart of Atlanta society because she is loved by everyone and volunteers for all the associations Atlanta finds respectable.

Scarlett on the other hand continues to face the disapproval of Atlanta by her ruthless business ethics and the way she flouts conventions. She discovers that she is pregnant and her husband Frank is relieved, hoping that the pregnancy will divert her interest in the business. However, she continues to run her business until far into her pregnancy. She gives birth to a baby girl and they name her Ella.

Shortly after the childbirth, Scarlett returns to managing her businesses to her husband’s utter dismay. Uncle Peter would ride her around but after an encounter where some Yankee women insult and belittle Uncle Peter, he stops riding Scarlett around because he was hurt that Scarlett did not stand up for him. Melanie asks Archie, one of the strangers she hosts in her cellar to drive Scarlett around and he agrees. Archie is mysterious and taciturn but is dependable enough to keep Scarlett safe. However, Archie stops driving Scarlett around when she begins to use the labor of convicts to work in her sawmills.

Scarlett resorts to riding alone to her sawmills amidst the security tensions in Atlanta. One on occasion as she leaves her sawmill, she is attacked by two criminals from Shantytown but Big Sam, their former slave at Tara rescues her.

Frank Kennedy, Ashley Wilkes, Dr. Meade, and many other men of Atlanta who are members of the Ku Klux Klan plot an attack on Shantytown in retaliation for the attack on Scarlett. Rhett gets information that the Yankee officers have set a trap for whoever would attempt to attack Shantytown that night and rushes to warn Ashley and Frank but they are already at the Ku Klux Klan meeting and he meets Melanie and Scarlett instead.

Frank Kennedy and Tommy Wellburn are already shot dead in the attacks but Rhett does his best to manipulate evidence and plot an alibi to save Ashley Wilkes and the other members of the Ku Klux Klan from being convicted. The alibi involves Belle Watling, a known prostitute in Atlanta testifying that all the men had been in her salon with her girls on the night of the attack. It was an alibi the elites of Atlanta found very scandalous but they grudgingly accepted it to escape death by hanging.

After the case is resolved, Rhett Butler proposes marriage to Scarlett who is widowed for the second time and she agrees to marry him.

Rhett and Scarlett get married and make indulgent trips for their honeymoon. Rhett is rich and indulges Scarlett’s whims which involves building a gigantic house with ostentatious furnishing because Scarlett is determined to be the envy of the people of Atlanta who treated her with contempt. But the people of Atlanta continue to snub her despite her wealth and only Melanie truly stands by her.

Scarlett gets pregnant the third time with Rhett’s child and gives birth to a baby girl. They give the baby girl a nickname, Bonnie. Scarlett tells Rhett that they are not to have sexual relations again because she does not want more children, Rhett agrees and they move into separate bedrooms.

Bonnie grows into a spoiled little girl who Rhett loves and showers with devotion. Rhett takes Bonnie everywhere he goes and the people of Atlanta see them as an adorable pair.

Melanie plans a surprise birthday for Ashley and asks Scarlett to stall him at the sawmill so that they can finish preparations. Scarlett and Ashley begin to talk in the office and the sawmill and in the course of the conversation, Scarlett realizes that she is no longer in love with Ashley. They share a friendly embrace and at that moment, India Wilkes and Archie walk in on them and assume they are having an affair.

The rumor of the affair spreads quickly through Atlanta but Melanie pays no heed to it and chastises anyone that dares mention it to her. Scarlett decides not to go to the party because she is ashamed of facing people with the rumors spreading about her but Rhett insists that she goes. Back home from the party, Scarlett and Rhett have an altercation after which Rhett makes love to her. She wakes up the next morning to hear that Rhett has gone on a trip with little Bonnie.

Before Rhett returns from his trip, Scarlett discovers that she is pregnant yet again. When Rhett returns, she angrily tells him how displeased she is about the pregnancy and Rhett sarcastically remarks that she will probably have a miscarriage. in response to the remark, Scarlett launches at him but mistakenly falls from the staircase and has a miscarriage.

Rhett buys a pony and teaches Bonnie to ride. One day, Bonnie dies from an accident while trying to jump a high bar with the pony and this puts a serious strain on Scarlett and Rhett’s marriage.

Scarlett takes a trip out of town but rushes back to Atlanta when Rhett messages her that Melanie is very ill. Melanie has just had a miscarriage from a pregnancy the doctors warned against and the complications are serious. Scarlett goes to Melanie’s sickbed and they talk, Melanie pleads with Scarlett to take care of Ashley and Beau when she dies. Scarlett meets Ashley distraught and realizes that Ashley had always been in love with Melanie.

Melanie dies and Scarlett is devastated. She walks back to her house alone and the mist and the darkness bring a dejavu of her nightmares, at that moment she realizes she longs for the comfort and security of Rhett’s arms and also realizes she is in love with Rhett.

When she gets home to Rhett, he has packed his belongings and is ready to leave. She pleads with him to stay with her and tells him she loves him but he is obstinate and tells her he cannot risk his heart anymore.

Scarlett asks him what she should do if he leaves and he responds that he does not give a damn.

When he leaves, Scarlett decides to return to Tara and assures herself that she can win Rhett back because after all “Tomorrow is another day”.

Is Tara a real Plantation?

No, Tara is not a real plantation. Tara is a fictional place in Margaret Mitchell’s popular historical fiction Gone with the Wind. It is a plantation in Clayton County acquired by the fictional character Gerald O’Hara on a wager with a stranger in Savannah. Tara was Gerald O’Hara’s most priced possession and he once told his daughter, Scarlett, that “Land is the only thing that lasts… the only thing worth fighting for” concerning Tara. Scarlett O’Hara would eventually come to love Tara later in the story.

How many times did Scarlett O’Hara marry in Gone with the Wind ?

Scarlett O’Hara married three times in Gone with the Wind. Her first marriage was to Charles Hamilton which she did to spite Ashley Wilkes. Her second marriage was to her sister’s beau Frank Kennedy, whom she snatched from her younger sister Suellen in a bid to save their home from bankruptcy. And her third marriage was to Rhett Butler with whom she had a bittersweet relationship.

What state is Gone with the Wind set in?

Gone with the Wind is set in the state of Georgia in the Southern part of the United States of America. Atlanta, Clayton County, and Jonesboro are some of the settings for the major events in the story.

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Onyekachi was already an adult when she discovered the rich artistry in the storytelling craft of her people—the native Igbo tribe of Africa. This connection to her roots has inspired her to become a Literature enthusiast with an interest in the stories of Igbo origin and books from writers of diverse backgrounds. She writes stories of her own and works on Literary Analysis in various genres.

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ARTS & CULTURE

How gone with the wind took the nation by storm by catering to its southern sensibilities.

From casting to its premiere, how Southerners viewed the film made all the difference

Carrie Hagen

Contributing Writer

For two and a half years, the press speculated about who would play the iconic role of Scarlett O’Hara in David O. Selznick’s production of Gone with the Wind. Various names were attached to the role by the media, including stars Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Paulette Goddard. David O. Selznick found his leading lady after a search that the New York Times called “a national emergency over the selection of a Scarlett O’Hara.” Fourteen hundred women auditioned to play the Georgia belle from Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling 1936 book – but when it went to Vivien Leigh, a British actress with only a few screen credits to her name, readers gasped. Southerners in particular were less than thrilled.  

“Scarlett O’Hara is southern, old southern, with traditions and inborn instincts of the South,” one reader wrote to the Los Angeles Times . “How in the name of common sense can an English actress possibly understand Scarlett, her times and the characterization is beyond a thinking American.” So concerned were Georgians with Leigh’s preparation that they created an agricultural problem: when the actress said she wasn’t familiar with the june bug, hundreds mailed specimens to her at Selznick-International Studios in Culver City. The California agricultural commission, worried about the Georgia insect’s effect on western peach buds, reportedly asked the post office to stop mailings from Georgia to Vivien Leigh.

The Southern investment in Leigh’s portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara was an act of self-preservation. Scarlett had become the personification of Southern romanticism; the story of her struggle to preserve her family’s plantation through war and the redistribution of Southern aristocracy was on its way to becoming the bestselling American novel of all time. Sixty years after the war had ended, Margaret Mitchell couched arguments for slavery and secession within the drive of a protagonist with hoop skirts and fistfuls of dirt. Scarlett O’Hara, a sexy, stubborn heroine in search of securing her agrarian roots became the symbol of the Southern character during Reconstruction.

The success of the book surprised its author. After giving her manuscript to a Macmillan editor, Mitchell, then 35, wanted to recall it. She got a contract instead, and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1937. “I just couldn’t believe that a Northern publisher would accept a novel about the War Between the States from the Southern point of view,” she said. 

In his review of the book for “Books of the Times, ” Ralph Thompson wrote, “How accurate this history is for the expert to tell, but no reader can come away without a sense of the tragedy that overcame the planting families in 1865 and without a better understanding of the background of present-day Southern life.” The screen would give Mitchell’s story a larger audience and a louder voice. Because of the resonance of the heroine’s struggle --- and the press that covered the search for a Scarlett --- the success of the film largely depended upon how well Vivien Leigh interpreted and projected her role.           

Film producer David O. Selznick bought the rights to the book for $50,000 soon after it was published in the summer of 1936. It was the most money Hollywood had given to a first-time novelist.

The screen adaptation of the 1,037-page book ran for nearly four hours and capitalized on the glamour of a romanticized world and a beautiful cast. The foreword text, layered over scenes from plantation life, including those of slaves picking cotton, promises just as much:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave. Look for it in books, for it is no more, a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind … 

Modern audiences can see the intrinsic racial problems in the film’s nostalgic treatment of the Confederacy.  Geraldine Higgins wrote in Southern Cultures in 2011 that “ Gone with the Wind is most often interpreted as shorthand – for moonlight and magnolias, plantation mythology, Confederate nationalism, or, to be very short, racism.”  Margaret Mitchell disputed charges of racism at the time, writing that “radical publications” would not accept the historical accuracy of the nicknames her characters used for African Americans.  “Regardless of the fact that they call each other ‘Nigger’ today,” Mitchell wrote, “and regardless of the fact that nice people in antebellum days called them ‘darkies,’ these papers are in a fine frenzy … But I do not intend to let any number of trouble-making Professional Negroes change my feelings toward the race with whom my relations have always been those of affection and mutual respect.” Scholar William E. Huntzicker analyzed Mitchell’s correspondence, suggesting that Mitchell “was both trapped by and sought to escape from Southern stereotypes.” The author’s true allegiance to Southern stereotypes is debatable, but her work’s projection of them launched a blockbuster, securing their place in the American imagination.

The film’s premiere in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, offered an occasion to recreate “this pretty world.”  The governor of Georgia had declared the day a state holiday, and Atlanta’s mayor had built a three-day festival around the showing.  By 8 p.m. that night, the front of Loew’s Grand Theater resembled a reproduction of Twelve Oaks, the O’Hara mansion on the Tara plantation, and most of the 2,000 audience members dressed in period costume. Women wore hoop skirts, black laced gloves and family heirlooms, and many men donned the Confederate uniforms and swords of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Before the movie began, approximately 300,000 fans lined the flag-decorated streets to greet the movie’s stars. Many of these stargazers also wore period clothes, including elderly women who held fading Confederate banners. A black choir in plantation dress – wide straw hats, cotton shirts and dresses and red bandanas, sang, “Thank the Lord.”

As the actors arrived, officers pushed crowd surges back. But not all of the main players were there: although her role as Scarlett’s servant Mammy would win her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, making her the first black actor to receive an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel was barred from attending the festivities with her co-stars in segregated Georgia.

Inside the theater, the audience honored the film’s foreword. They cheered at the playing of “Dixie,” yelled at references to war with the North, and cried during battlefield hospital scenes. And Vivien Leigh won their hearts with her Scarlett O’Hara. 

The president of the United Daughters of Confederacy said, “No one can quarrel, now, with the selection of Miss Leigh as Scarlett. She is Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett to the life.” Vivien Leigh took the Oscar for Best Actress.

When adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind is the highest grossing film of all time and sits at #6 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films. The book’s success facilitated much of this, as did the epic’s record-setting production costs, which brought elaborate wardrobes and new uses of Technicolor and sound to the screen.  But perhaps another reason for its longevity is its glamorous portrayal of an ideology that lost a war a long time ago.

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Carrie Hagen | READ MORE

Carrie Hagen is a writer based in Philadelphia. She is the author of We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping that Changed America , and is writing  The Vigilance Committee , the narrative of antebellum Philadelphia's interracial abolitionists.

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GONE WITH THE WIND

by Margaret Mitchell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 1936

Don't sell this as primarily a novel of the Civil War. Sell it rather as a novel in human emotions against the background of the Civil War and its aftermath. It has the finer qualities of So Red The Rose , — the authentic picture of people and places and incidents, something of the moonlight and honeysuckle of the glamorous Old South, much of the traditions and manner of life and thought. It has too great length — the author will learn with experience the valuable and essential lesson of selection. But, from the point of view of story and characterization, I found it more absorbing reading, more vital characterization than the Stark Young book. Instead of taking form as a succession of pictures from a family album, the characters come to life with the impact of life upon them, and their impact, one upon the other. The central figure is a girl, spoiled, selfish, dominating, wilful, magnetic, — you hate her, you long to throttle her — but you can't help acknowledging her fascination and admiring her spirit. An opportunist, yes, but she pays the price. The author comes from the state of which she writes — Georgia — and she knows her background thoroughly. She can write.

Pub Date: June 30, 1936

ISBN: 1416548890

Page Count: 33

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1936

HISTORICAL FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2016

New York Times Bestseller

by Yaa Gyasi ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016

A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.

A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.

Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.

Pub Date: June 7, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Yaa Gyasi

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• Welcome to the Modern First Editions Blog

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The first edition of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was published in 1936 by The Macmillan Company in New York. It consisted of only about 5000 copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year. It went on to at least 100 more printings and is one of the bestsellers of all time.

First Edition Points:

• Date of 1936 on title page (if there is no date on the title page it is a book club edition)
• “Published May, 1936” on copyright page
• “GONE WITH THE WIND” in the right column on the rear panel of the dust jacket In the second printing “GONE WITH THE WIND” was moved to the very top of the left column In later printings there were reviews of Gone with the Wind on the rear panel

Early printings can identified to the printing by counting the printings on the copyright page:

“Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1936 [2nd]. Reprinted June (twice) [3rd & 4th], July (three times) [5th, 6th, 7th], August (six times) [8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th], September, 1936 (four times) [14th, 15th, 16th, 17th], October, 1936 (six times) [18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd]”

Making the example I used a 23rd printing. I have labeled the printings in brackets to explain how to identify which printing you have. For even later printings just continue counting each printing mentioned and remember that May isn’t listed so count that first than June and so on. Printings continue to be labeled this way into November, December, January of 1937, February, March, April, the years 1938, 1939, 1940 and so on.

The Photoplay Movie Edition, which was labeled “Motion Picture Edition” was issued in January, 1939. It was illustrated with stills from the movie starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. It was issued both in wraps (softcover) and in hardcover with dust jacket.

Book Club editions generally have less pages (while the trade edition had 1037 pages) and do not state any printings on copyright page. If it has the date in roman numerals it is a book club edition.

The first edition book is often sold with later printing or facsimile dust jackets. Watch out for those who state that their book is a First Edition without providing these points.

Value: First Edition of Dust Jacket: Fine, Perhaps $40,000 but very hard to find a Fine/Fine example, if signed with good provenance $100,000 Very Good, $6000-$7500, if signed $15,000 First Edition without Dust Jacket Very Good, $750-$1000, if signed $4,000 The Second Printing “Published June, 1936” is worth about $500 in dust jacket, if signed $2,000 Other early printings in dust jacket generally sell for between $50 and $150, without dust jacket between $10 and $40 Any later printings with Mitchell’s signature would be worth at least $1,000.

Motion Picture Edition (December, 1939) Paperback is worth about $35 and the hardcover with dust jacket is worth at least $250 for the first printing of this edition. The Grosset & Dunlap (1939) photoplay edition is worth about $100 in a nice dust jacket.

Many collectors also buy each individual printing they can find so they can have a complete set of the printings of Gone with the Wind. Several of these printings are harder to find in dust jacket than the First Printing.

First Editions on  Abebooks  and  Ebay

Many collectors also buy Gone with the Wind memorabilia and collectibles such as plates, figurines, movie posters, documents or photos signed by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, lamps, dolls, etc. If you are interested in these type of items I would suggest you search eBay . It’s probably the best place to find those type of items.

149 Comments

would you be able to speculate on the value of a june 1936 edition thats in good shape but with out the dust jacket?

Stacey: if it is the second printing which states “Published June, 1936” with no mention of later printings than it should be worth about $100-150.

I think mine that I have is June 1936 no other dates and without the dust jacket in really good shape and I think I gave about $5 for it shipping and all about 10 or so years ago. Wasn’t sure if it was worth anything…I am a big fan of the movie, I also have some of the 8mm film pieces.

A nice copy of the second printing might go for $250 or so.

What is the value of an illustrated motion picture edition published in 1940, hard copy, in good condition, but without the dust jacket?

I just purchased a copy that has the date in roman numerals — 1936 — no month, no subsequent publications, no jacket. Very good condition. Any thoughts?

Elizabeth: About $10, maybe $20 if your lucky, on Ebay.

Valerie: Any copy that has the date in roman numerals is a book club edition and does not have any collectible value.

Greetings! I have a rather old looking copy of “Gone With The Wind” 1936 October edition. As I was leafing through the pages I noticed that the page 524 has part of the page literally cut short, and at the top of the page “GWTW” upside down with the page 529 on it. On page 528 it is also is cut short with the letters “GWTW” unside doen with the number 525….the happens again on page 526 and page 533. Is this part of the printing in all October editions? Just curious…..Regards, Azahar

Azahar, I don’t think it is a feature of all October printings, in fact there may be only a few like this. Unfortunately it doesn’t make it worth more – though perhaps collector may be interested.

I have the June 1936 edition with all of the printings shown throughout the 1936. I only have the book and not the book jacket. I would like to know the approximate value and where can I sell it. Thanks for your help.

I have a motion picture edition. But the cover is unusal, it’s antually shows “The flight to Tara”. And THERE ARE NO ILLUSTRATIONS at all, I don’t think THERE EVER WERE ANY ILLUSTRATIONS….Is that weird of something?

I have a first edition book club edition (the year is in roman numerals) in average condition (some looseness to the spine – not a lot and some scuff marks on the spine) without the dust jacket. I want to sell it on ebay. what do you think a fair price to start it would be.

David: Sorry but none of the book clubs have any value.

I’m curious about the edition I have. It’s gray with a blue spine. On the back of the title page it states the Copyright, MCMXXXVI by the MacMillan Company but no other dates of publication. It’s only 689 pages, but it’s very small print in double columns. I hate to admit that I threw away the jacket when I was a teenager. Anyone have any information about it–maybe a book club edition printed like that to cut down on cost by saving paper? Thanks.

Marilynn: You have a book club edition as is evidenced by the 689 pages, the double columns and the MCMXXXVI date. The trade edition had 1037 pages, single column, and the 1936 date on the title page.

I would like to know more about this “Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell” edition I have. It’s is a blue hard cover with gold inlay on the spine and on the front cover only and all blue on the back. On the back of the title page it states the Copyright as being, MCMXXXVI by the MacMillan Company. I think from what I can remember it has about 700 pages give or take a page or two. Oh by the way before I forget I believe it has double columns. It was given to my wife after her Aunt passed away. Hay is you there yet?

I have a first edition; 1936 on the title page and on the following page it just says “Set up and electrotyped. Published May 1936.” There are no additional dates, so I believe this is a true first edition. It does not have the dust jacket, but has some small tears at the top and bottom of the spine. This copy is also signed. It almost looks like pecil, but I believe it is pen (maybe a calligraphy type pen – hard to say). Any idea the value and also do you know how I go about authenticating the signature? Thanks for the advice.

Mymackinaw: You have a book club edition. None of the trade editions have a roman numeral date.

Jennifer: Very nice.

Here are some samples of Margaret Mitchell’s signature: http://www.fadedgiant.net/html/mitchell__margaret.htm http://www.allgwtw.com/autographs7.htm http://www.tomfolio.com/autographimg.asp?sigid=1008&ret=AGIni

You could pay someone to authenticate it but I doubt it would be worth it.

I would say it should be worth at least $3000 as the lowest price on Abebooks is $4900 but its hard to get a good price sometimes.

I have a 1936,June copy of Gone With the Wind. I found a newspaper page inside with a picture of Barbara O’Neill and Thomas Mitchell who played the parents of Scarlett at the Oriental and Woods theaters. Is this worth anything? How about the book? It is grey and in good shape

Carol: if it is the second printing which states “Published June, 1936? with no mention of later printings than it should be worth about $100-150.

Hi, I have a Motion Picture Edition from MacMillan Co, where the bottom of the print run information says Illustrated Motion Picture Edition, Published December, 1939. It has a red hardcover with blue lettering and a color photo of Gable and Leigh. The Publisher’s Prefact talks about the ten million people reading it, and it has the 3 pages of casting info. Color photos on p. 8, 24, 168, 137, 201, etc. Total of 391 pages. Definite cover, corner and spine damage, and I don’t know if it ever had a jacket but it’s gone if so. Binding is intact, but minor to moderate wear on some pages. Any idea if this is a rare edition or what this is and how much it’s worth? Thanks, Jonathan

I have a Complete and Unabridged Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell. It is a motion picture edition Published December, 1939. Reprinted January, February, 1940 with a Dust Jacket. From everything you said above, I believe it is an original first edition motion picture edition. If I wanted to sell it, what would be the best way to go about doing it?

I have a December 1939 Motion Picture Edition Hardcover that belonged to my mother. What would this book be worth. It is green. Pages are all in tact and in excellent condition. Spine is hanging on. Thank you.

Will a 1936 edition be worth more than a few hundred dollars when 2036, the 100 year anniversary, approaches?

After reading all these different written stories I am shocked. I only thought there was one “Gone with the wind” Great movie, terrific book. The books I find are always better. I have a blue hard book. No dust jacket. It was my moms. I amagine my little girl at the time tore it up. I am puzzled, I do not know nothing about Title pages, etc, etc, But it does say Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell, and at the bottom it says. The macmillan company New york. Next page is. Copyright 1936 by the macmillan company. copyright renewed 1964 by Stephen Mitchell and Trust Company of Georgia as Executors of Margaret mitchell Marsh. Copyright renewed by Stephens Mitchell.

all rights reserved.

Simultaneouly published in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Next page, to J.R. M. 719 pages not counting all the vacant ones. Can you help me if this book is worth keeping, selling, or trashing?

My home address is Luana Graff 5432 Joy Court North Port, Fla, 34287

I have a Gone With the Wind that shows Copyright, 1936-first line, top of page and Illustrated Motion Picture Edition published December 1939. Reprinted January, February, 1940. It has 391 pages and a few illustrations from the movie. Would this book carry a value significant enough to insure? Can you give me names of persons who can repair said book? The binding is completely gone. Please advise.

Could you please tell me if the 1936 edition marked “Published June 1936. Reprinted June, 1936. July, 1936 (Three times.)August, 1936.(Four times.)” is the October 1936 edition.Are there any value for the early editions that are not first editions?

Jonathan: If there are no other printings mentioned after the December, 1939 on the copyright page you have a first printing of the Motion Picture edition. It the condition it is in it probably wouldn’t be worth more than $20.

Leslie: You have the Second Printing of the Motion Picture edition. If the dust jacket is in pretty good shape it should be worth about $100.

Janet: I would expect it to be worth $20 without the dust jacket.

Jennifer: Yes, I would expect that when 2036 comes around that there would a be a greater interest in that year for Gone with the Wind books but I can’t say whether they would increase in value much. Probably the first printing would increase in value quite a bit but the rest of the 1936 printings are not likely to be worth more than $20 or $30 even then.

Donald: What you have is the fourth August Printing. There were 6 printings of Gone with the Wind in August, 1936. If it were an October printing it would state October along with the other months on the copyright page.

Velva: No, I do not think it would be worth insuring. If it were the first printing of the motion picture edition in nice condition you it might be worth insuring if you had other books to insure as well but since this is a second or later printing of said edition and in bad shape it isn’t really worth much. Here is a link to the current prices on Ebay for the Motion Picture Edition: https://modernfirsteditions.net/es/gone-wind-motion-picture

To find someone who can repair books search the following terms on Google: Book Binder Book Conservator Book Repair

You should be able to find someone but they will likely charge $50 an hour + costs.

I have a Gone with The Wind hardcover copyright 1936, by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Published June, 1936. Reprinted June (twice)……… (four times), March, October, 1937; February, 1938, October, 1938 ( three times ), November, 1938. Very good conditio, but no dust jacket. Any idea of its worth.

Al: Your book is worth between $10 and $20 in the current market. There are people who collect each printing but they aren’t likely to pay more than between $10 and $20 for a 1938 printing without a dust jacket.

Didn’t find this particular question already asked: My hardcover copy of GWTW – Copyright page reads “Set up and electrotyped. June,1936”. Underneath “Reprinted June, 1936”. No dust cover, although book description from dust cover is glued to inside front and back covers. This appears to be an old library edition with the library card holder still glued to the back having check-out dates beginning Jul 23, 1936 – Sep 8, 1936. Still in pretty good shape considering age. Recently bought at an Estate Sale for $10. Any value above this? Thank you.

I have a gone with the wind hardcover that has a date of 1936 and has 1037 pages.No dust jacket.

What can you tell me

I have a hardcover Gone With the Wind with dust jacket and author’s signature on first page. In very good condition.Copyright,1936. Published June 1936,reprinted June(twice),July(three times),August(six times),September 1936(twice). Can you give me any information?

I have a Gone with the Wind Hardcover copyright 1936, by the MACMILLAN COMPANY, Published June, 1936, reprinted June (twice), July (three times), August (six times), September, 1936 (four times), October, 1936 (six times). In good condition; doesn’t have a dust jacket, but the hard cover is in good condition. Approximate estimated worth?

What is the rough value of a 1st Edition, 1st printing (May 1936) in very good condition without dust jacket, signed by Margaret Mitchell? I am trying to figure out what “facsimile” dust jackets are, who made them, when they were made, and if the addition of one adds to the book’s value, or is worthless. Thanks for your service! Libby

I have an old copy of Gone with the Wind. The cover dose not have a dust cover but looks just like the dust cover would with the drawings and everthing on it in green. It has the cover page with the date ripped out of it however. Is there any other way to tell what year it was published? Would it even be worth anything since this page with the date is ripped out?

http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=10150328864725355&set=a.10150290296840355.511232.887665354 here is a picture of the book I explained above

Rebecca Jamison: You have a third printing. Since it is Exlibrary without a dust jacket, I doubt you would be able to get more than $10-$20.

My copy of Gone With the Wind says Set-up and electrotyped Published June 1936. Reprinted June(twice) July(three times) August(six times) September 1936(four times) October 1936(six times) November 1936(three times) December 1936. Any value? No dust jackey ,good condition.

I have a Motion Picture Edition 1940. Does anyone know what it is worth?

Hello, I left a question on Nov. 14. Please see it on the list. Can you help me with the value of my book? Thanks! Libby

I have a gone with the wind book, flat grey , no cover. copywright MCMXXXV1, by the Macmillian company. 689 pages with two columns per page. I take it this has no value?

Lori: It’s hard to tell but you should be able to get at least $2,000, probably a bit more. Here are some samples of Margaret Mitchell’s signature: http://www.fadedgiant.net/html/mitchell__margaret.htm http://www.allgwtw.com/autographs7.htm http://www.tomfolio.com/autographimg.asp?sigid=1008&ret=AGIni

Jane: 1936 printings are worth about $10-$25.

Stu: Later printings the first year generally sell for between $10-$25.

Peter: It depends on if it is hardcover or paperback and if it has a dust jacket. If it is paperback $10, if hardcover $20, if in dust jacket maybe $40. These are just estimates as it depends on condition as well and whether someone will pay you these prices.

Libby: Here are some samples of Margaret Mitchell’s signature: http://www.fadedgiant.net/html/mitchell__margaret.htm http://www.allgwtw.com/autographs7.htm http://www.tomfolio.com/autographimg.asp?sigid=1008&ret=AGIni

I would say it should be worth at least $3000 as the lowest price on Abebooks is $4900.

A FACSIMILE dust jacket is an exact copy of the first edition dust jacket. It doesn’t add any value to the book although it can be nice to have. FACSIMILEs have been made for years. Usually they are marked as such but occasionally they are not. Generally you can tell that the jacket wasn’t printed in 1936 when you feel a FACSIMILE dust jacket.

Gayle: Yes, it is a book club edition with basically no value.

Thank you for publishing this information. You are extremely patient with all of the people who ask the same question that you have already answered several times:)

I have a copy of Gone with the Wind on the publication page is says “Copyright, MCMXXXVI,By The MAMCILLAN COMPANY” It is followed by the “All rights reserved…..etc.” on the botom of the page is says “PRINTED IN THE UNITED STAQTES OF AMERICA”. There is not dust jacket the front of the book is plain but the spine is printed with the title, author, and printer. Any ideas is this is truly a first edition and the value.

Stephanie Wakefield: Any copy that has the MCMXXXVI roman numeral date on the copyright page is a book club edition and has no value.

I have black hardback cover that states: Copyright 1936 by Macmillan publishing company, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Copyright renewed 1964 by Stephens Mitchell and Trust Company of Georgia as executors of Margaret Mitchell Marsh. Copyright renewed 1964 by Stephens Michell.

All rights Reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by and information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Second page states: to J.R.M It dose have 1037 pages and has never been read. can you tell me about how much its is worth. Thank you very much.

Diane: It sounds like you have a later printing from the 1960’s or 1970’s. Most likely there should be a number line like 66 65 64. The lowest number would be what printing the book is. Some people do collect each printing even the later ones like this but I don’t think anyone would pay more than $10.

The first page on the GWTW book that I have has a note written by hand. It says “Mother from Margaret” “Christmas 1936”. Also has Set up and electrotyped. Published June 1936. Reprinted June(twice), July (three times), August (six times), September, 1936(four times), October, 1936 (six times), November, 1936(three times), December, 1936. I looked up Margaret’s signature and it looks the same. Could this be an original?

Many Thanks

Daisy: I would be quite interested in seeing a photo of the inscription. I think it probably isn’t a Mitchell autograph. Mitchell’s mother died in 1919. So unless there is another person she would call mother it seems unlikely.

I have a GWTW book it seems to be a red/orange color book. And it says Copyright 1936. Set up and electrotyped. Published June 1936 Sixty fifth printing October 1949. No dust jacket

I have a January,1937 GWTW in a near fine dj with a GREEN “PULITZER PRIZE WINNER” banner around the dj. How many do you know about and approx. value? Thanks, Les

I have a GWTW book in very good condition-a little damage to the top of the spine-no jacket. Copyright, 1936, by The Macmillan Company. Published May, 1936. Any idea on its worth? Thanks a bunch!

Hi – thanks for all your advice with this. Any idea of the value of a May, 1936 first edition with a June 1936 cover? Don’t know how that happened, but the back DJ definitely has GWTW listed at the top of the first column rather than the second and the price reads $1.49 which seems also seems wrong? The book seems to be original first printing, though. Thanks!

Kelly: Sorry for the delay. The dust jacket would seem to be a 1940’s printing (maybe 1942) as that is when they had the $1.49 price. In the 1930’s they had a $3.00 price on it. Someone “married” the later dust jacket to the first edition book. It should be worth $900 or so depending on condition.

hello i might be able to get a first edition gone with the wind 1936 (May) needs new binding for 400 dollars would it be worth it to buy it and fix it needs to be rebound it does not have dust cover just wanting your two cents thank you.

Erick: Sorry for the long delay in replying. It may be worth buying if you are a collector. If you are thinking about selling it after you have it rebound I do not think you could make any money on it.

Good morning. I have a 1st edition, 13th isuue. It has a dust jacket in pretty good shape that says “THIRTEEN PRINTINGS . . . 326,000 COPIES” My grandmother wrote her name in it. What’s the best way to deal with books like this? Inherited a few different first editions, a few signed by authors. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you. – Jed

Jed: Sorry for the delay. If I had the book I would put it on Ebay. You probably can get between $50 and $125 out of it.

Mr. Gutenburg. I have a copy of Gone With the Wind.It was my grandmothers copy. On the copyright page it says

Copyright 1936 by The MACMILLAN Company.

Setup and Electrotyped.Published June 1936. Reprinted June(twice),July(three times), August(six times),September(four times), October(seven Times),November(four times), December,1936(twice),January,1937 (six times),February(four times)

the next page it just says : To JRM

The above info is verbatim. I doesn’t have the dust cover it is in good shape the binding is in good condition , no pulling away or tears or rips.I has been in a box stored in the attic for God knows how long and does show a little wear on the spine but no tears.The pages have a little yellowing very end of the pages and it seems that some dampness at some time has discolored some pages but none of the facing on the pages are damaged .The pages are not evenly cut like today’s books and the pages are thicker than most.The cover is grayish with blue writing on the spine and title. I hope that this helps and thank you Rick Perry

Rick: Sorry for the delay. I assume you want to know the value. It is worth between $15 and $25. Earlier ones sell for bit more.

Hello, could you tell me aboout the value of my copy? I have a hardcopy of 1937 (THE MACMILLAN COMPANY)without dust cover. It has a signature “To Helene Pflästerer argret Mitchell Atlanta,March 30, 1937” The signature is authentic, as the old lady Mme Plästerer was a personal acquaintance of mine and she knwew Margret Mitchell personally. Thank you

Julia: I think it would be worth Between $1500 and $2000. A dealer may be able to get more. It is good that you have a good provenance on it. With signed books people want as much information as they can to determine that is not a fake.

Why do the book club editions of GWTW have no value? Thank You.

Inita: Book Clubs of GWTW have no real value because: 1. Book Club Editions of almost any book are not collectable. 2. Book Club Editions of GWTW are very common, they are inferior quality compared to trade editions, and tehy have a different dust jacket illustration.

Hey there, I just picked up a first edition book from a thrift store this week. It’s not in good condition at all but I had a question about the introduction in the book. The introduction is in a different font than the rest of the book, it’s in like a typewriter font. You can even see where it was backspaced/erased and then continued. Does that make sense? Wasnt sure if that was normal or not. Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂

Wendy: That seems strange. I have a First Edition in my hands as I type this and there is no Introduction in the first edition. Perhaps someone typed up an introduction and bound it into the book.

I have a gone with the wind book dated copy right MCMXXXVI, On the opposite side page is written: To J.R.M Do you know who this person is and if its a first edition?

I am a very happy owner of a 1936 book club edition. It’s one of my most prized possesions, even though it does not have any value in collector market. I picked it up when I was about 9 years old at my local library book sale for ten cents! Love that it’s printed in newspaper columns.

To me it’s priceless. 🙂

I have a 1961 edition of GWTW, it has cover and an insert about the author. It’s in fair condition. It also states it’s a anniversary edition. Any thoughts on price or history.

Hello, I have a copy of Gone with the Wind. Its a hard cover with the dust jacket. The book I would say is in good condition as is the jacket.

The information states: Copyright 1936 by the MacMillan Company. Set up and electrotyped. Published June 1936, Reprinted June (twice), July ( three times ),August ( six times ),September 1936 ( four times),October 1936 ( six times ),November 1936 (three times ).

Could you please tell me the approx. value of this book.

Hello- I have a first edition/first printing, May 1936 with 1037 pages. My question is it has a brown leather cover with the front board separated from the spine. The spine has the book title/author and the words “first edition.” I understand this cover is not original, so is it best to restore this cover or have a new calfskin cover made for this edition. Thank you in advance.

i have a gone with the wind copyright 1936 printed in november 1936 good condition no dust cover does any one whats its worth ? [email protected]

I have a first edition of Gone With the Wind signed and dated. It was a gift from my mother’s aunt. Signiture looks authentic when comparing to other Margaret Mitchell signitures. The signiture is Mrs. Hunt Mitchell. I can not find any reference to a Mrs. Hunt Mitchell in her bios. I can email the page if it helps. Any thoughts.

i have a copy of gone with the wind copyright mcmxxxvi, the cover is bare but the spine has the title and authors name, 689 pages counted, excluding the blank pages, the writting is in two coloms on each page, i think this is a club edition, but in a previous letter you stted $2000, in another one you said book club editions are worthless

I have an old Gone With The Wind that my mother had. After reading most of the above it appears to be a book club edition because of the roman numerals. That’s good to know at this point. I do have a question… Ms. Mitchell wrote on the dedication page, To, J.R.M. Who is this person? And, is this dedication in all of the books no matter whether they are frist editions, etc. Also, I do not have the dust jacket and wondered how much it may be worth?

Thank you for any infor you can provide.

Sorry about the delay in replies on this site. I have been too busy too do anything with this for quite a while.

Karen: All GWTW books that have 689 pages are book club editions and are not first editions in any sense. They are fairly worthless on the market. The person the book was dedicated to: J.R.M. was her second husband: John R. Marsh, who was the one who inspired her to write the book.

William: If your 1961 edition is a book club edition there would be no value; if it is a trade edition with a price on the dust jacket in nice condition it might be worth $7.50 or $10. There are collectors looking for later printings but they have to be the trade edition and in nice condition.

Kim: Your November, 1936 printing with Dust Jacket should be worth between $50 and $150 depending on the condition. An average copy would probably sell for $50 and a nice copy might go for over $100.

Carl: It might be worth rebinding it. A first printing rebound in nice leather you might get $500-$600, maybe a bit more.

John: A November printing in good condition would sell for between $10 and $25, once in a while one will sell for more on Ebay (usually when misrepresented).

Sam: I don’t know anything about a Mrs. Hunt Mitchell and I was not able to find anything. If you look up her genealogy maybe you might come up with something but I couldn’t.

Michelle: I don’t know what you are talking about when you say I stated the worth as $2000 in a previous letter. The date on the copyright page means nothing. If it is roman numerals it is a book club edition. There are thousands of book club copies and they all are worth nothing. The two column page layout is found only in the Book Club edition.

Eltina: The person the book was dedicated to: J.R.M. was her second husband: John R. Marsh, who was the one who inspired her to write the book. All GWTW books that I have seen have that dedication. Yes, it would be a book club edition if it has roman numerals and thus it is not worth anything.

Louane: I’m glad that your Book Club Edition of GWTW is priceless to you. I am sure there are many others that feel the same way. Most of the people that view this post are looking into finding out the value of their books monetarily and that is the nature of most of the here.

Hi, I just picked up a copy of Gone with the Wind at a thrift store ($3!), from what I figured it’s the 35th printing (ends at “January 1937 (five times)”), non-bookclub, no DJ. Binding is a little exposed in the inner rear cover but it seems strong, covers are not loose and no missing pages. Inner covers are brown with age and it has a handwritten message from a father to daughter on the cover page. Also, a modern sticker on the title page in the upper right with a later owner’s name and address. Other than that the book looks good throughout, very clear text.

I don’t intend to sell it, but given that condition what would this be about worth? I’m just curious how far my $3 went. 🙂

$3 isn’t a bad price. These go for about $10 to $20 on Ebay but occasionally less. But $3 is a good price. I would have picked it up for that price!

Hello and thank you for your help. Today from a charity shop I got a First Edition Gone with the Wind, June 1936 with 1037 pages. The binding is in ‘used’ condition, but the inside is in good condition with lovely hand-cut pages. You have probably answered this question a million times before, but could you possible tell me about how much it is worth/ Best wishes Linda

I read this whole thread. Just wanted to say thanks for the load of good info. I picked up an August 1936 edition (8th printing) today at goodwill for $2. Has dust jacket in pretty good shape. Not a bad score.

Linda: The second printing (June, 1936) in that condition is worth maybe $50 or $75. It depends. I sold one on Ebay for $200 but that was a pretty nice one.

CamelJoe: Great! It’s nice to get a bargain. I’ve found a few of those early printings in dust jacket myself.

I have a Hard Cover Gone With the Wind book in German. Bottom of copyright page states “Copyright 1937 by H. Goverts Verlag G.m.b.H., Hamburg, Druck: Hanseatishe Druckanstalt GmbH, Hamburg Printed in Germany. Next page top center it states “Erstes Buch” which translates to first book. Any idea of value? No dust cover.

It’s hard to say. I had a copy of the German edition in Dust Jacket (later printing from about 1955). I think I sold it for $25. I am not sure you can tell if it is the First German Edition. The one had looked like a First German Edition but it mentioned on the dust jacket that Margaret Mitchell had died, meaning that it was at least printed after 1949. If you can get $10 or $20 out of it it would be good. A First German Edition in Dust Jacket probably would sell for at least $150.

I would think that maybe the Dust Jacket did not belong to that book? I appreciate your response and information. I am by no means any book expert…just love the story, Mom was German and I was given the birth name of Scarlett, really! Thanks much!

I think there was a dust jacket but I can’t say for sure. Very interesting that your mother was named Scarlett!

No, her name was very German…she came here to the states and named me Scarlett. Thank you!

Oh, I didn’t mention that on the cover there is a picture lined in “gold” of Tara about 1 1/2 inch wide 1 inch high. On the spine the text is also in gold. The book is tan. I can’t find ANYTHING on this particular book.

I picked up a GWTW edition that I believe is a trade issue without a dust cover and some damage to top of spine. The last date on the copyright page is October, 1936. (seven times). Does this mean it was a November first reprint? Do you have an idea of value?

Yes, that would be a trade printing. It would be the 7th printing in October 1936. As far as value they usually go for $10 or $15 but sometimes more (the better the condition the better the price you can get.

I have several first editions of GWTW, however, I have one that is a 4th printing 1936, 1037 pages, all in beyond excellent condition. Unlike the others, on the title page, beneath Gone With the Wind, is a photo of Margaret Mitchell printed on the page. I have not seen another like this, can you tell me anything about it, I can’t find any information about this printing.

Jule: I don’t know. I have never seen or heard of one with a photo of Mitchell. I would be interested in seeing a photo.

I thinks I have a rare book. Text in two columns per page. 689 pages. No copyright. no title page. title on spine only. Book is blue. Do you have any ideas when it was printed or value? It is Macmillan. Thank you.

Pamela: Not rare. Book Club Edition. Two columns means BC Edition.

Wondering what the actual print dates were for the October 1936 seventh printing. Hoping it falls on my anniversary and that’s the 23rd. My husband bought me the book as a gift for our anniversary and I’m hoping it makes his thoughtfulness even more meaningful. Thank you.

Stephanie: I wouldn’t know the exact dates. Macmillan might not even know anymore.

We have a copy of a 1953 printing of “Gone With the Wind” in German translation. Book is Hardcover, no dust jacket but in very good condition, about two inches thick. First I’ve ever seen of this version. Lots of posters in German but no but I’ve seen. Does this have any value other than the usual for this age.? Publisher is “IM LESERING DAS BETELSMANN BUCH” 1953.

Larry: German editions aren’t worth too much except a first German edition which was from 1937.

I have a copy of GWTW that reads New York, The Macmillan Company 1937…What is approx worth of such an addition?…thanks

Rich: Less than $20. If it was super nice copy maybe a little more. With dust jacket up to $125.

I read through the thread, but didn’t see an answer to my question…so if you have already answered it, I apologize! I’m just wondering when the book club edition (with the roman numerals MCMXXXVI) was published? I know they don’t have any monetary value, but I’m just curious about the publishing date. Thanks so much!

Misty: Most of the book club editions were actually printed in the 1960’s or later. I don’t know for sure but I doubt it was printed before the 1950’s.

1938. No cover, but signed by Vera B. Mitchell 1939.

Neisha: Not sure who Vera B. Mitchell is.

I have a Gone With The Wind grey color leather? Inside reads copyright 1936 by The Macmillian Co. copyright renewal 1964 by Stephens Mitchell And Trust Co. As executors of Margaret Mitchell Marsh. copyright renewed 1964 by Stephens Mitchell. All rights reserved

Simultaneously published in Canada

Value please

Rosemarie: Not much.

I have a gray, no book jacket, copy of GWTW. Reads “set up and electrotyped. Published Junr, 1936. Reprinted June, July (three times), August (three times), 1936. What edition might this be? It’s a gift to my mother dated November 1, 1936 and in good shape?

Mary Jane: I think it is a Ninth printing. Probably worth $25.

I have a first edition of Gone With The Wind is anybody interested in buying it?

I would be interested in buying but I wouldn’t pay enough so I would suggest that you list it on ebay .

i have a copy of gone with the wind only date has on it is the roman numerals for 1936 is this a first edition also if i may maybe one of you can help have a copy of treasure island illustrated from 1921 pub by charles scribner & sons new york cannot find info any where on it thank you for your time

Willard: All copies with roman numerals are book club editions (or much later printings).

to gutenburg thanks for the help they where gifts so would defanetly not sell them just happy to have them i new to book collecting have part of the original harvard classics as well as a book of sir walter scott dated 1860 among two other books i have from the 18 hundreds one question tho what year more or less would my gone with the wind be?

I have a signed ,1937 (January, 1937 (twice) ). The signature is dated Feb 22,1937 there is no dust jacket & it has some spine damage does it sound like there might be any value in it? What if it were to be repaired?

If it is a authentic signature it would definitely be of value. Even with spine damage it should sell for at least $1000. I wouldn’t bother repairing it. It probably wouldn’t be worth it.

Hello, I have a copy of gone with the wind limited edition book published 1976 by the Franklin Library exclusive for subscribers in excellent condition. The inside cover is red and what looks like satin cloth. There is no isbn number. Can you tell me if it is valuable. Thanks.

Your Franklin Library edition is worth about $75.

Thank you. I have another book: The Heart Of The World printed 1887 by Elder Publishing Company. A picture of the Author is on the inner second page and signed by the author G. S. Weaver, this book is quite used and bound cloth. There is no ISBN number, is it a valuable book. Thank you.

I have a copy of G.W.T.W., no dust jacket. Inside it says “set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1936. Reprinted June (twice), July (three times), August (six times), September 1936 (four times), October 1936 (twice). What edition might this be?

Christine: 19th if I counted correctly.

I have three volumes of Gone With the Wind in Japanese with a hand written note in each one from Margaret Mitchell “To the Reference Department of the Atlanta Carnegie Library from Margaret Mitchell, Atlanta, Ga, May 6, 1939”.

Each volume has the same note, signed and dated. On the inside of the cover of each is the stamp “Discarded”. A member of my family bought these in a used book sale in the sixties. Please give me your opinion of the value of these books. Thank you.

Pat: Margaret Mitchell’s signature is quite valuable. Each volume should be worth about $1500 to $2000. If it’s a three volume set then I would try and get $4000 or $5000. It’s fairly unique so it’s possible you could get more but they are exlibrary so maybe not.

I have a copy of Gone with the Wind, no idea how old as it only has copyright, MCMXXXVI. No other info on when it was printed. No dust jacket. Any clue on this?

Jessica: All copies with dates in roman numerals are book editions. MCMXXXVI is 1936 by the way but your copy was printed much later, probably in the 1960’s or so.

Seems I have an August 1936- 3rd printing but what I have that is interesting is original newspaper reviews of the book. There is a name of ‘Mary Melling w Miller’ date of 11-12-1936. Also has some handwriting about reviewed and some dates. More newspaper clips of actors talking about the book and which actor they think would be good for it. Also a newspaper clipping of the review by Wm. F. McDermott. Another newspaper clipping with Mrs. Margaret Mitchell picture (Copyright 1936,by N.A.N.A. Inc) There are checkmarks, words & phrases circled indicative of a reviewed book.

That is just some of the newspaper clipping in this book. Any ideas?

Those are definitely of interest and would add some value to the book as well as to the intrigue of this particular copy. I looked up the name really quick. I couldn’t find anything.

I have a copy of Gone With The Wind..Green Book..No copy rights page just has the title page by Margaret Mitchell at the bottom of page has THE MACMILLAN COMPANY New York…The Book has 689 pages it’s a very old book hard bound copy and no jacket the only title is on the binding not the cover at all…I was only wondering what year it may have been published I believe it is a book club edition but not sure…

Larry: Yeah, all copies with 689 pages are book club editions. It’s probably from the 1960’s or 1970’s but it’s hard to say for sure.

Who is Edna Lewis name is signed In my gone with the wind 1964

Milton: I’m not sure if it is the same Edna Lewis but there is a famous person with that name: Edna Lewis (April 13, 1916 — February 13, 2006) was an African-American chef and author best known for her books on traditional Southern cuisine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Lewis .

I purchased a green leather copy with 3 cotton bolls on the cover at a garage sale recently. It is missing the dust jacket. It appears to be the 24th print matching all the criteria listed above. However, I cannot find anything online that resembles the cover. Have you ever run across a similar one?

Jim: Perhaps it was rebound in a different binding. If you upload a photo to a free photo website send me a link and I’ll take a look at it.

There is a seventh printing in October 1936, at least that is what my edition says.

Brian: Yes, there was a seventh printing in October 1936 (24th printing overall). The example I used stopped at the 23rd printing (6 times in October) but you can keep going on the same principle.

I have a Gone With The Wind book ISBN 0-02-585390-2 with the dust jacket and in excellent condition is it worth anything?

I recently acquired a Gone With the Wind book, and I believe it is the 3rd printing (Published June 1936, reprinted June 1936). I have googled images and it doesn’t look like any of the other books. It doesn’t have a dust jacket, but the cover is more elaborate with embossed leather corners and the ‘spine’ is leather with raised bands. Is this some sort of special edition with value? Thanks!

Jennifer: It sounds like you have a copy that has been rebound nicely in Leather. Yes, something like this might sell for about $75, maybe a bit more.

Hi, have a British edition of GWTW 1938. Book is signed by Margaret Mitchell.

For Harold Latham from Margaret Mitchell Atlanta,Ga June 22, 1938

Sure, it should be worth at about $2,000. If it was a first printing it would be worth more.

I’ve checked the other postings and I don’t believe this question was asked. What’s the difference between a red cover BC and blue? I never heard of “book club” until I bought my copy of GWTW. The dealer was very informative, so I know blue covers, roman numerals is BC. But why the red cover? Also, she has a rare ‘galley’ of GWTW. But I forgot how it was distinguished. Do you know?

I should clarify that the red book has the BC’s roman numerals. I know a red cover edition was put out just before the movie edition. Perhaps this is it?

Lucy: I think all of the book club editions were at least 1950’s or newer. There was a red cover trade binding that was in the late 1930’s (I think) and early 1940’s (definitely).

Can you help me put a value on a Gone With the Wind hardcover (red), copyright 1936, 85th Printing 1976? The yellow jacket is not in horrible condition, except the corners have tape on them and there is a small tear. The hardcover and pages are in excellent condition. No bend pages. I also have a few articles pertaining to Gone With the Wind. It was handed down to me from my aunt. Thank you so very much.

Is this still active? I have a 1936 book club edition with the Roman numerals imprinted. I’m wondering how the cover has images that so closely resemble the actors in the movie, when it was printed years before the movie came out? I didn’t pay much for mine but I do wonder if the value has appreciated at all.

Melissa: The 1936 copyrighted book club edition came out many years after 1936, most likely 1960’s.

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•   Authors & Illustrators
•   Margaret Mitchell
•   Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind

Margaret mitchell.

Beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best New York Times

Not just a great love story, Gone with the Wind is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. Told from the standpoint of the women left behind, author Margaret Mitchell brilliantly illustrates the heartbreaking and devastating effects of war on the land and its people Fannie Flagg

The best novel to have ever come out of the South . . . it is unsurpassed in the whole of American writing Washington Post

Gone with the Wind is one of those rare books that we never forget. Gone with the Wind is an epic story. Anyone who has not read it has missed one of the greatest literary experiences a reader can have James Lee Burke

Books by Margaret Mitchell

Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis.

A risk of all writing about embodiment is that the writer’s thinking overtakes the messy material itself, leading to banality or sentimentality or false tidiness. Everyone knows that writing about sex is hard; what fewer people are aware of is that it is just as hard, or even harder, to write about illness. (Working on my last book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness , I found myself lamenting the fact that literature has so little to say about illness . In particular, we still have too few novels or poems that forcefully capture the bewildering experience of entering the bureaucracies of the modern Western healthcare system at our most mortally vulnerable moments.) The novelist Garth Greenwell has produced some of the best writing about sex in our time; perhaps it is not a surprise, then, that in his new novel, Small Rain, he offers an exquisite addition to the literature of illness.

I have been excited for Small Rain ever since I heard Greenwell read a virtuosic passage from it at The Yale Review Festival in 2023. The novel is narrated by a mid-career poet who undergoes a serious medical crisis and ends up in the hospital for around two weeks. The novel’s story is largely contained to that period of time, and within the slurry of hours it portrays, Small Rain meditates on mortality and the politics of COVID; the recompense of art, especially poetry; and the ultimate redemption that domesticity, despite its dailiness, brings. Few writers at work today can think the body onto the page with as much complexity and reality as Greenwell does in this book.

We corresponded by Google doc this August; the result has been lightly edited. — Meghan O’Rourke, Editor

Meghan O’Rourke Small Rain stages a writer’s confrontation with mortality and unimaginable pain—a medical crisis which brings him into the grips of a bureaucratic medical system. Why did you think this was the material for a novel?

Garth Greenwell The book is not autobiography, but I underwent a medical crisis in 2020 similar to the narrator’s and emerged from it utterly bewildered—about what my body had undergone, about what the experience meant for my understanding of my life. That state of bewilderment is what compels writing for me, or at least novel writing. I think we need art because there are situations we can’t think about with our other tools for thinking. I couldn’t reason my way to an understanding of what had happened to me; I needed to dwell in it. And to do that I needed the tools of fiction: character and scene, and also the peculiar pressure of the aesthetic.

By “aesthetic,” I just mean work whose meaning resides not just in its content, in what it says, but in its medium. In aesthetic writing, the nondenotative aspects of language—syntax, image, repetition, rhythm, the deep histories of words—become dense with meaning and emotion; they exert a pressure on connotative meaning; they allow language to mean more . Aesthetic writing isn’t particular to fiction, of course, but the aesthetic is more available to me, just because of my sensibility, the tools I have at my disposal, in fiction.

I also needed invention, I needed to make things up. People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is “true,” it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed. It’s like looking at someone’s oil painting and asking, “How much of that is flax?”

MO’R Ha! As a poet who draws on lived experience, I think of the poems as aesthetic objects that have little to do with autobiography—so this is a satisfying analogy.

At one point in Small Rain , the narrator says, “The pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” In her own writing about illness, Virginia Woolf lamented what she called “the poverty of the language” we have for illness and pain. As she put it, “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself.” Do you agree? Was overcoming this poverty of the language part of the aesthetic challenge of writing this book?

GG I think that’s just baked into art as one of the challenges; we always feel the poverty of our medium. (We also often feel its richness.) Art tries to make incommensurate things commensurate. Trying to put the world on the page is a wildly quixotic endeavor: How does one translate sight or taste into language, much less feeling? I’ve often said that writing sex (which I’m often asked about) and writing the experience of eating a muffin are equally difficult to do well, by which I mean absolutely impossible. All writing strives to cross that gap between experience and the medium we have to express experience.

That said, I do think extreme pain doesn’t just resist but destroys language; it places our medium beyond our grasp.

MO’R Precisely. In her seminal text, The Body in Pain , Elaine Scarry famously wrote, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language.” As someone who has experienced many kinds of pain—some obliterating, some chronic—I felt you fully captured the strangeness of acute pain. (For another conversation: There is, too, the way both sex and pain can produce a kind of shame that is almost hard to recognize one feels.)

GG I think that’s true. I think I’ve always been interested in the body in crisis—and sex and pain are both kinds of crisis. In Small Rain , the narrator says he feels annihilated by the pain, “a creature evacuated of soul.” It’s important that in that first line of the novel he’s reporting his experience of that first crushing pain, not in the grip of it. In the grip of it, he’s not capable of speech. Woolf has that beautiful image in her essay on sickness of the utterly inviolable privacy of some secret chamber of the self: she says it’s like a patch of ground where not even the prints of bird feet disturb the snow. That’s where overwhelming, crushing pain resides. I don’t want to say it places us beyond humanness; clearly, it’s part of humanness, something that we undergo. But it displaces many of the recognizable signposts of human experience.

MO’R The writing about your narrator’s hospital stay is granular and detailed. You make the reader feel the almost second-by-second ordeal of being in a hospital—the many needles, the noises, the lights, the grim ceiling tiles one stares at during even grimmer procedures. (This all rang true to me as someone who has spent a lot of time in hospitals.) Why did you decide to enact the reality of the medical system in such detail?

GG Mostly because I just thought it was interesting . Woolf also notes in her essay that the experience of being gravely ill—or even of being moderately ill, of being indisposed—is weirdly underreported in literature. (I’ve started keeping a list of great hospital sequences in literature; it’s a surprise to me how few they are.) The texture of life in the hospital, which is at once utterly regimented and also weirdly unmoored, rigidly timed and timeless—capturing that texture is one of the projects of the book.

MO’R “Rigidly timed and timeless” is a fantastic description of hospital chronology.

I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time.

GG I do think that’s how it feels. And capturing the texture of existence is at the heart of artmaking for me. If there is a hope of uncovering the revelatory, of arriving at something “universal” to human experience, it lies in the devotion to the particular, in examining the moment-by-moment experience of an embodied being. Certainly that’s true of the tradition I feel like I’m working in, which I guess I would call the novel of consciousness.

MO’R Narrative time in Small Rain moves slowly and blurrily, much the way it does in hospitals. Tell us more about the formal choices that you made here—why and how did you slow time down so much?

GG This ties in with the idea of the novel of consciousness, which has a deep kinship with the lyric poem. It depends on a kind of sifting of experience. We are quicksilver beings; we can experience in a flash the whole gamut of emotion. Slowing down time offers a chance to unpack experience, to try to sift through the information that makes charged moments feel charged.

I like narratives that have clocks, because clocks (paradoxically, maybe) give you enormous freedom with time. If something is keeping external clock time for you, you’re free to explore internal time, our experience of time (now fast, now slow) as wildly as you want. Virginia Woolf can fly off anywhere she wants in Mrs. Dalloway because the chimes of Big Ben will always anchor her again in clock time. The regimentation of the hospital is something like that. Every four hours, the narrator will get his pain medication; every eight hours, he’ll have a heparin shot. So the narrative can go where it wants: to his childhood; to his relationship with his partner, L; to his thoughts on art and poetry.

The novel’s first sentence suggests how time will work in the novel. It places us in the ER, where the narrator is being asked about his experience; it also reaches back to the experience of the pain itself in that impossible attempt to recover and catch it. Time in the novel functions like a set of transparencies laid atop one another. Which is how memory works, I think, and especially how sensory experience interacts with memory: when we encounter a smell, for instance, or a taste, we also encounter all our memories of that smell or taste.

MO’R Researching The Invisible Kingdom I was struck by the fact that there are not as many English-language books about illness as I wished there were. I found myself clinging to the ones I liked—Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness ; Emily Dickinson’s poems about pain and migraines. Do you see yourself as writing within a tradition of literature of illness? If so, how did that shape your sense of what you were doing?

GG I don’t think I was consciously working within that tradition, in part because, as you say, there are fewer of those texts than one would expect. Certainly I had read around in what we might think of as the literature of illness, especially in the literature of AIDS—and Hervé Guibert’s accounts of hospitals and clinics, just to name one example, surely influenced the way I imagined those environments in Small Rain . But that wasn’t conscious. My greater awareness of literature exploring the experience of being a hospital patient has come after writing Small Rain , and again, it’s a little hard to find passages that do the work I’m interested in. There’s the beginning of James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone . There’s the (tremendously powerful) middle section of Miranda July’s The First Bad Man . There’s Pamela Erens’s Eleven Hours . I haven’t read the Broyard—I’ll seek it out.

MO’R I think it’s wonderful; it captures the disjunction between intimacy and bureaucracy that is key to our experience of health care. The other day, a newly minted medical doctor and I were talking about the challenges patients experience with our healthcare system, in particular in hospitals; a main problem, I suggested, is that we experience what for us are deeply intimate crises in the most bureaucratic and impersonal environments, amongst harried and busy strangers. I recall being struck that it was a doctor neither my mother nor I had ever met who, in the hospital, told us she was dying. Not her oncologist; not her primary care doctor; the random resident who was on call that day that she was admitted from the ER. I am not sure what there is to be done about this fact, but naming that reality, as you do, feels very important to me. What felt most important here about the milieu of the hospital as a setting for your book?

GG This was one of the primary points of fascination for me. The narrator receives so much particularized attention, and his body is made to produce so much particularized information. But that particular attention strips him of his individuality, of what he feels as his personhood. It’s only in his moments with his partner, L, that he feels returned to himself, a person again, not just a patient. He longs to be seen by someone who knows him in the context of his life outside the hospital, because so much of who he is is that context.

MO’R That longing to be fully seen in your hospital bed is very powerful; I felt it too. We want to be visible as we face our mortality.

GG That’s right, I think. But there’s an asymmetry built into the patient-health practitioner relationship: the patient is undergoing something utterly unprecedented, life-changing, all-consuming. The health practitioner is doing her job—a job that is largely routinized. The narrator in Small Rain feels himself reduced to “an interesting case” for the people who are treating him—and reduced is the word; he feels this as a diminishment. He’s affronted (when he’s not charmed) by the fact that the ICU nurses chatter about their days outside his room while he (and everyone else in the ICU) is undergoing something so dire.

That asymmetry doesn’t shut down human interaction, though, or human recognition: acts of tenderness, intimacy, connection still occur. The narrator compares his relationship to his nurses to his experience of teaching. The teacher-student relationship is asymmetrical, too—routine on one side and singular, unprecedented on the other. (You’re only ever a tenth grader once.) At the end of the day, the teacher goes home; she sets aside (or tries to, anyway) the urgent worries of the day, the narratives of her students’ lives. Surviving as an educator means drawing a boundary around one’s care for one’s students, leaving it, as best one can, in the classroom. That doesn’t negate the care; it doesn’t make it unreal. And both of these are relationships that have an ending baked in: for both the health practitioner-patient and the teacher-student relationship, success means the relationship ends.

MO’R Even as hospitals can feel impersonal and bureaucratic, they are full of some of the most tender and surprising intimacies we may ever encounter; I think of the ICU nurse that your narrator becomes friends with. There is an exquisite passage near the end of your book where a tired doctor sits down with your narrator and, perhaps because she has had a difficult day, engages with him about the difficulties of his experience more fully than anyone has so far. It’s a fantastic exchange. Can you tell us more about this section—why you wrote it, if you always knew it would be there, what it means to you?

I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it.

GG This is one of those humanizing moments. The danger of bureaucracy is that it can occlude personhood: thinking about someone as a patient can get in the way of seeing them as a full human being. On one hand, I’m not sure there’s really a way to get around this, or even that we would want to get around it; if thinking of me as a piece of faulty machinery allows a surgeon, say, to intervene in a way that keeps me alive, think of me as faulty machinery! I don’t think we need everyone we interact with to behold us in the fullness of our complex humanity. Bureaucracy, routinization, efficiency—these all have their place. I don’t know where the right balance is—there isn’t a perfectly right balance, I’m sure—and I’m very glad that, as you said, my job as a novelist is to describe the problems as we live them, not to design solutions.

But even if those systems structure and limit the ways human beings relate to each other, they don’t entirely make human relating impossible. (Does anything?) A theme of all of my books is that any time two human beings have a face-to-face encounter, everything is possible—including cracks in bureaucracy, moments when two people can engage with each other as people. This is what the narrator feels in that moment with his surgeon, and he feels it happen more than once with Alivia, the nurse he spends the most time with. It felt important to me to have humanizing moments—not just because they’re moments where the narrator feels seen in a more adequate way but also because they’re moments when he sees , when the doctors and nurses become fuller human beings for him, too.

MO’R Some of the writing I admire most in Small Rain pertains to the narrator’s own discomfort in his body, and the gentle appreciation he comes to have for it. You’re written, previously, about eros; here, eros is replaced by thanatos —but also by a gentler emotion: tenderness. Is this a book, in some ways, about the problem—and perhaps redemption—of being a mind that inhabits a body?

GG Absolutely, yes. In some sense, the book is also a kind of biography of the narrator’s body, the way his body is itself a historical record. He has always had an antagonistic relationship with it: he’s taken it for granted, but more than that, he’s resented it, even hated it. There’s a crucial moment in the book, when the narrator is being bathed, that is among the most difficult things I’ve written. He looks at his body—which is covered in bruises and traces of adhesive, which has IVs and A-lines running into both arms—and, in describing it, comes to see his body as a suffering creature, as something available not just to the disgust and resentment he has always felt for it, but also to love. It’s a kind of revolution for him to think that, to see the possibility (even if it remains, for him, impossible) of a radically different relationship to his body.

MO’R Even as the novel keeps us almost claustrophobically inside the hospital, we learn a lot about L, the narrator’s boyfriend/partner, and how the two met and bought a house. Why did you include this interlude—which is a kind of reprieve from the hospital—in the book?

GG I guess I think one of the central questions of the book is domesticity—its pleasures and discontents and, more than that, whether it’s possible to remain attentive to the experience of long life with another—I mean whether it’s possible to resist growing numbed or deadened to one’s day-to-day experience. Certainly my narrator has stopped seeing his life in anything like its fullness. He takes it for granted, as he has come, at least in some ways—maybe not disastrous but not great, either—to take L for granted.

Then illness and pain take that life away from him—for a few days, at least, it seems entirely possible that he might die. The paradox is that in taking that life away, illness restores his life to him: it shocks him into attentiveness. You know, in my first two books, this narrator is very attached to a sense of his life as adventure—as geographic adventure (they’re books about an American abroad), and even more as erotic adventure. To be in his early forties, seven years into a long-term partnership, sharing a mortgage in a small midwestern town—from a certain perspective, that might seem like the opposite of adventure. But in the light of his own mortality, in that new attentiveness to his life this sickness gives him, he can recognize that domesticity is an adventure too.

MO’R The book is set during the pandemic and COVID politics play a role in setting up the atmosphere. Is the connection of the political and personal here important to you?

GG It is, and I think the explicit meditations on politics, and on life in a particular moment in America, are one way in which this book departs from my earlier work. I wanted to capture somehow, from the vantage of this hospital bed, in which an individual body is in terrifying, maybe terminal crisis, how the larger social body is in crisis too.

Or that’s how it seems to me now, looking back. As I was writing, I was just trying to capture what it felt like to be in a particular body in a particular place at a particular time—and that means, necessarily, thinking about the larger social world in which that body is situated. Late summer 2020 was tumultuous: COVID, bizarre anti-masking hysteria, the approaching election, Black Lives Matter protests. It felt as if the country was under immense stress, as if the idea of a common national project had shifted out of reach.

The narrator lives in a small blue town in a very red state. There’s no sealing himself off, as one can at least somewhat do in larger cities, from people who hold political beliefs that are repugnant to him. He’s also a newish homeowner. This makes him think about how we live with one another, and it makes him take seriously virtues he had maybe been disdainful of before, virtues of neighborliness: the meaningfulness of talking about the weather, of bringing somebody a batch of cookies when a storm has damaged their house. A certain kind of thinking sees the political as utterly suffusing existence, and I guess I think there’s a way in which that’s true. But the narrator comes to see that maybe it’s not the whole truth, and maybe the project of civilization, minimally conceived—the ability to live together without violence—depends on valuing spaces and ways of being with each other that de-emphasize explicit political allegiance. Some of the narrator’s neighbors are Trump voters. They’re still his neighbors.

MO’R As someone whose own work is invested in reimagining contemporary health care, restoring the ethic of care at the heart of it, I find myself hoping that doctors, nurses, and hospitalists read this book; certainly, I’ll be recommending it to them. Do you have any such hopes? Do you think Small Rain might help shine a light onto the human realities behind medical bureaucracy, or is such a consideration not present when you are shaping a narrative?

GG Writing is such a private act; for the years that I work on a book, I’m not thinking at all about who might read it. I do think art is useful to us, but I think that usefulness is hugely mysterious—you can’t engineer it. I sometimes think that the usefulness of art depends on a commitment to defending art’s uselessness. What I mean is that it’s only through an utter commitment to its own private, often formal or aesthetic ambition, however sealed off from utility it might seem, that art can become publicly useful—that it can “shine a light onto human realities,” in your beautiful phrase. I’m being vague; I’m not sure I can do better. Maybe what I mean is that we can never know how our books are going to be received, how they will be useful (or fail to be useful) to other people. The idea that we can know the effect of anything we make is always an illusion. But for art to have a chance of reaching other people at all it has to have integrity first and foremost as art.

The ambition of this book—to embody, as deeply and vividly and complexly as possible, the experience of being a particular embodied being in time—is a formal project. I never write with any utility, any lesson, in mind. Existence doesn’t offer lessons—though my narrator might be seeking them. But the experience of stepping into the light of another person’s existence—the experience art offers with a vividness and profundity unavailable elsewhere—can have profound effects. I do hope doctors and other care providers read this book. Art calls us to attention—attention to the world, to the personhood of others. And attention is the heart of care.

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