About Gone With the Wind

Since its first publication in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone With the Wind has captivated more than 28 million readers around the world.  Against the dramatic backdrop of the Confederate South, from the heady early days of the Civil War through its devastating end, Mitchell created the most famous love story in all of fiction: that of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. 

Scarlett’s schemes, divided passions, and unstoppable efforts to save her beloved home, Tara, are the driving forces of Gone With the Wind.  But Rhett Butler has remained an enigmatic hero—powerful, sexy, seemingly amoral but deeply honorable, and mysterious to friends, enemies, and even to Scarlett herself.  Now, in Rhett Butler’s People, award-winning author Donald McCaig answers the questions that readers have asked for nearly eight decades.

About Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell was born November 8, 1900 in Atlanta to a family with ancestry not unlike the O’Hara’s in Gone With the Wind. Her mother, Mary Isabelle “Maybelle” Stephens was of Irish-Catholic ancestry. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, an Atlanta attorney, descended from Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots. The family included many soldiers - members of the family had fought in the American Revolution, Irish uprisings and rebellions and the Civil War.

The imaginative child was fascinated with stories of the Civil War that she heard first from her parents and great aunts, who lived at the family’s Jonesboro rural home, and later, from grizzled (and sometimes profane) Confederate veterans who regaled the girl with battlefield stories as Margaret, astride her pony, rode through the countryside around Atlanta with the men.

The family lived in a series of homes, including a stately home on Peachtree Street beginning in 1912. Young Margaret attended private school, but was not an exceptional student. Margaret Mitchell eventually entering Smith College in the fall of 1918.

Gone With The Wind was published in June 1936. Margaret Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her sweeping novel in May 1937. The novel was made into an equally famous motion picture starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. The movie had its world premiere at the Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta December 15, 1939 with Margaret Mitchell and all of the stars in attendance.