From the Margaret Mitchell House web site:
Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, occupies an important place in American literature. After breaking publishing records with one million copies sold within six months, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into over forty languages, and remains one of the best-selling novels of all time.
Even before the book’s publication, producer David O. Selznick had secured the film rights at Mitchell's asking price of $50,000, which was more than any studio had paid for the rights to an author’s first novel.
With its detailed atmosphere of a vanished age, its compelling characters, its forceful narrative, its description of human survival, and its portrayal of the persistence of romantic dreams, Gone With the Wind continues to entertain and sometimes exasperate readers. As well as being a novel of epic proportions, it is valuable as an historical document, though one that should be carefully read. A depiction of life and conflict in the nineteenth-century South, the novel also documents twentieth-century emotions about the region’s past and memories of a way of life that many considered gone with the wind.
