Gone with the wind historical background
Romanticizing the Old South: A Feminist, Historical Analysis of Gone With the Wind Gone with the Wind has been hailed as a triumph of American literature and film. In 1937, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her sweeping portrayal of the crumbling of the Old South. Since then, the novel has sold millions of copies. The film, a production by David O. Selznick, exceeded all expectations, receiving critical and public acclaim that included an unprecedented ten Academy Awards. Even today, Gone with the Wind, despite its many historical inaccuracies, forms the basis of American popular memory of the Old South. There have been many tales of the Old South in the years since the Civil War, but Margaret Mitchell's tale is the one that is most deeply embedded in American culture. An important element of the story's popularity is Scarlett O' Hara, a strong female character. America's obsession with Gone with the Wind began with the first publications of the novel, grew with the fevered search for the perfect actress to play Scarlett O' Hara, and exploded with the outrageous popularity of the film. Throughout this transition from novel to film, the story underwent many changes. Revisions in dialogue, in the number of children Scarlett bears, and in other details are abundant in the film. Nearly every scholar who has written on Gone with the Wind has pointed out those changes, but what is perhaps of even greater importance is what remained the same - the character of Scarlett. Strong willed, determined, and with a finely honed survivalist instinct, Scarlett's nature was unchanged by the transition from book to film. When the book was published, the character of Scarlett O' Hara would have been a familiar one to readers well acquainted with the history of Southern literature. William R. Taylor's _ Cavalier and Yankee_ is perhaps the best historical analysis of the literary.
This Study Guide consists of approximately 109 pages of chapter summaries, quot;s, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Gone with the Wind. This section contains 763 words (approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page) The Great Depression and Reconstruction Eras Although Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind focuses on the Reconstruction years following the Civil War, many of Mitchell's Initial readers living through the Great Depression could identify with the hardships endured by Scarlett and her family. When all the slaves of Tara run off, and Yankees loot the plantation by burning cotton and stealing valuables, the O' Hara family is left with very little. This experience was one shared by many plantation owners in the South, some of whom also lost their land because they were unable to pay the new taxes. Similarly, many people in the 1930s had lost their jobs, savings, and homes after the stock market crash of 1929. Economic recovery during the 1930s was slow. Those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs often had to take salary cuts. Like Ashley, Melanie, and their son in Gone with. (read more) This section contains 763 words (approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page) Copyrights Gone with the Wind from Gale. © Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
Jun 30, 1936: Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, one of the best-selling novels of all time and the basis for a blockbuster 1939 movie, is published on this day in 1936. In 1926, Mitchell was forced to quit her job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal to recover from a series of physical injuries. With too much time on her hands, Mitchell soon grew restless. Working on a Remington typewriter, a gift from her second husband, John R. Marsh, in their cramped one-bedroom apartment, Mitchell began telling the story of an Atlanta belle named Pansy O' Hara. In tracing Pansy's tumultuous life from the antebellum South through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era, Mitchell drew on the tales she had heard from her parents and other relatives, as well as from Confederate war veterans she had met as a young girl. While she was extremely secretive about her work, Mitchell eventually gave the manuscript to Harold Latham, an editor from New York's Mac Millan Publishing. Latham encouraged Mitchell to complete the novel, with one important change: the heroine's name. Mitchell agreed to change it to Scarlett, now one of the most memorable names in the history of literature. Published in 1936, Gone with the Wind caused a sensation in Atlanta and went on to sell millions of copies in the United States and throughout the world. While the book drew some criticism for its romanticized view of the Old South and its slaveholding elite, its epic tale of war, passion and loss captivated readers far and wide. By the time Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, a movie project was already in the works. The film was produced by Hollywood giant David O. Selznick, who paid Mitchell a record-high ,000 for the film rights to her book. After testing hundreds of unknowns and big-name stars to play Scarlett, Selznick hired British actress Vivien Leigh days after filming.
Influences and Historical Background Upon its publication, reviewers drew comparisons with William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Margaret Mitchell claimed not to have read Thackeray's novel until after she had completed her Civil War saga and confessed her inability ever to get very far in Tolstoy's monumental work. She did admit her saturation in Charles Dickens and her sense that her work was a ' Victorian' type novel. Mitchell chose an epic moment in American history and never flinched in bringing it to life on a grand scale; a creative energy reminiscent of the nineteenth century drives the work. From the memorable first sentence through the Twelve Oaks barbecue on the eve of the war, the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett O' Hara's unforgettable journey back home to Tara, and her beginning struggles during Reconstruction, Mitchell's narrative power (at the very top of its form) propels the reader through the limning of a culture (its grace and color and folly and weakness a vivid evocation of the cauldron of war, and a bitter picture of the devastation following. The author spoke often of her research in accounts and memoirs of the period, but probably more important was her knowing people who had lived through the era. A child naturally drawn to old people and to the great drama of her region, Mitchell had gone horseback riding with Confederate veterans, sat listening in the parlors of faded belles, and taken every literary advantage of her exposure to the past. The result is a detailed and realistic sense of the texture of the period— Scarlett O' Hara's green morocco slippers, the bright rag rugs in her bedroom at Tara, Melanie Hamilton's black lace mittens—that leads to the capturing of color and movement in great scenes like the Twelve Oaks barbecue and the ball in Atlanta. Alternating with such scenes are remarkably evocative.