3 May 1937: American author Margaret Mitchell wins the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Gone with the Win
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
Fiction/Civil War Era novel
960 pages
Scribner (1936/reissued in 2011)
Recommended for: Rhetoric students/adults
One evening, the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I was perusing my mom's bookshelves and came across a beautiful, hardbound, slipcased copy of Margaret Mitchell's classic novel, Gone with the Wind. With an excess of time on my hands, I thought, "Well, why not?" That night was the first night in a childhood full of wonderful literature that I stayed up all night to read. I read, and read, and read--sleeping just long enough to recharge so that I could get back to it--until I finished the very last page. When my mom passed away, that copy of Gone with the Wind was the first thing of hers that I put aside to treasure forever.
Although its length can make Gone with the Wind seem daunting for a high schooler (but let's be real here--Harry Potter, anyone?) and the subject matter of an American Civil War classic (that word almost guaranteed to turn off three-quarters of the teenage population and half of the adult) seems to have the makings of an epic yawn fest rather than an epic literary experience, I cannot recommend this one highly enough. The story is so grand and the characters so compelling that a reader cannot help but be swept up in the story. At the time, the Civil War held absolutely no appeal for me. As a person who grew up in Asia and Europe, I felt no kinship with the characters or the subject matter. I was seriously just that bored; I honestly do not recall why I chose Mitchell's book out of everything on Mom's shelf. Maybe I just wanted bragging rights to having read what appeared to be a tome worthy of bragging about. Maybe I am being too tough on myself, and the reader in me wanted to see just why the novel is universally lauded as the American novel.
The Civil War was not some long-ago event for Mitchell. As a youth growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, she would go horseback riding with Confederate veterans and hear firsthand accounts of life during the war. At the age of twenty-five, she was a married homemaker with time on her hands and decided to try her hand at a novel, told from the Southern viewpoint, about life in her native Georgia during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Tapping into all those first person accounts heard in her childhood, she crafted the character that would come to be called Scarlett (Mitchell originally named her Pansy but fell out of love with the name prior to publication), an impetuous, spoiled debutante on a cotton plantation. Mitchell's Scarlett became a character of fantastic depth, a survivor who grew up quickly in the blood-soaked brutality of the Confederate South and a solid anchor for a massive cast of characters that brought the Civil War and a dying way of life alive for readers.
It took Mitchell nine years of sporadic writing to finish the novel. In 1935, while the work was still in progress, it came to the attention of an editor friend of Mitchell's who convinced Macmillan's editor-in-chief to consider the work. Macmillan offered Mitchell a contract and the title Gone with the Wind was agreed upon. Published on 30 June 1936, the novel took America by storm, selling fifty thousand copies in a single day and one million in the first six months. It would go on to win both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and become the highest selling novel in the history of U.S. publishing. To date, more than thirty million copies have sold worldwide in the more than forty languages that the book has been translated into.
Of course, it did not end with the novel. Less than a month after the book's release, movie producer David Selznick bought the rights for $50,000--at the time, a record for the highest check ever cut for a debut novel. Selznick would go on to award Mitchell another $50,000 and offer her his Academy Award for Best Picture after allegations arose that Mitchell had been taken advantage of and swindled out of her rightful due. Mitchell accepted the check but declined Selznick's offer of his Oscar. The movie, like the novel, would go on to become iconic.
Mitchell declined to do publicity for either the novel or the movie, realizing that she was not of fan of life in the spotlight. As all the furor began to die down, Mitchell was exploring ideas for another novel when, in August 1949, she was the victim of a speeding car and died of her injuries several days later. It is a tragedy that such a talent only had the opportunity to give the world a single novel, but what a legacy it is.