gone with the wind book margaret mitchell

It was, to my then-reader’s mind, a novel depicting the Deep South in the United States - a deeply fractured time and place - filmed in a time and place deeply fractured by racism. (Yes, I know this is the kind of thing that Americans likely write papers about in grade school, but I didn’t study American history until I was in university.)Īnd that research is why I gave away my Deluxe VHS cassettes.Īnd the pretty books about the movie that I’d loved so.īut somehow I still did not equate the racism that permeated the process of filming “Gone with the Wind” with Margaret Mitchell’s novel. That all his leading ladies had to suffer through his Hollywood kisses.Īnd I learned this because I wrote a paper on race relations in 1930s America viewed through the filming of Gone with the Wind. I learned that Clark Gable was said to have terrible breath. Then something went awry in my later twenties.

(Many of my favourite characters in literature are unlikeable, but I don’t need to be friends with them after all.) Loved to love Rhett. Loved it unreservedly. Loved to hate Scarlet.

We all have framed jigsaw puzzles of our favourite books’ covers lining our walls, right?Īll of this to say that when I was sixteen - and for a good while afterwards - I loved this story. Gone with the wind were the years of deliberately memorizing dialogue from favourite movies, but I naturally picked up some of my favourite passages.Īnd, by naturally, I mean that I was capable of reciting small chunks along with the characters, complete with gesture and cadence.Īnd, oh, yes, I had a 1000-piece framed jigsaw puzzle of the original movie poster. Not only was this cool because I’d never seen the full movie before (only televised versions, which always cut out different parts: who knew!) but because I could view and re-view selectively. On two VHS cassettes, with a beautiful illustrated-in-glossy-colour booklet (which is what used to be so thrilling, before there were DVDs with really cool extras). When I was in my 20s, however, I did get the Deluxe version of the movie. My friend’s mother had a hardcover bookclub edition that replicated the original cover, which I saw some years after I’d read it, and I wanted it instantly, but I still have the same paperback. At sixteen, this was definitely the longest book I’d ever read, and I was constantly eyeing my tasselled bookmark, its proximity to the scar I had inflicted on the pocket-book’s spine.) (But their copies didn’t have a solid crease at the halfway mark. It seemed like everybody I knew had this book on their shelves, even if they weren’t big readers. It’s the copy that I remember seeing on the shelves of my older female relatives as well. This is my original copy of this novel, which I first read when I was sixteen years old. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936)

Gone with the wind book margaret mitchell