Reading Order
Gone with the Wind Reading Order
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) is one of the best-selling American novels of the 20th century — a sweeping historical romance set in the American South before, during, and after the Civil War, following the tempestuous Scarlett O'Hara from her privileged life on the Georgia plantation Tara through war, poverty, and the moral compromises of Reconstruction.
Where to start
Gone with the Wind
Complete Gone with the Wind Book List
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Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell·1936·The complete standalone novel. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1937). The only novel Mitchell published in her lifetime. - Buy
Scarlett
OptionalAlexandra Ripley·1991·An authorized sequel by Alexandra Ripley, following Scarlett's story after the events of Gone with the Wind. Generally considered inferior to the original but popular with readers who want to know what happens next.
Gone with the Wind — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gone with the Wind racist?
Yes, by contemporary standards, Gone with the Wind contains significant racism that readers should be aware of. The novel romanticizes the antebellum plantation South — presenting slavery as a benign institution, depicting enslaved people through the stereotypical 'happy slave' lens, and treating the Ku Klux Klan sympathetically as a response to Reconstruction violence against white Southerners. Mitchell, writing in the 1930s, shared the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy that was then dominant in Southern historical consciousness: the idea that the antebellum South was a civilization of grace and beauty destroyed by Northern aggression, and that the slaves were content with their condition and attached to their enslavers. The novel's treatment of the rape of Scarlett by Rhett Butler — presented as a romantic moment rather than a crime — is also deeply problematic. These elements do not disappear upon reading; they are woven into the novel's basic framing. Readers who engage with Gone with the Wind historically, understanding it as a document of 1930s white Southern mythology rather than historical truth, can engage with its genuine literary qualities (plot, character, pace) while remaining clear-eyed about its racial ideology.
What makes Gone with the Wind so enduringly popular?
Gone with the Wind's enduring popularity rests primarily on Scarlett O'Hara — one of the most vivid and complex female protagonists in popular fiction, whose defining quality is her refusal to be defeated. The famous closing line — 'After all, tomorrow is another day' — crystallizes Scarlett's essential character: resilient, self-deluding, pragmatic, sometimes cruel, always resourceful. Her relationship with Rhett Butler is one of the great love stories in popular fiction precisely because it refuses easy resolution — two people who are perfectly matched in their self-absorption and refusal of conventional virtue, who genuinely love each other and repeatedly fail to show it. The epic scale of the Civil War backdrop gives the romantic story its grandeur and raises the personal stakes. Mitchell wrote the novel in fits and starts over a decade and revised it extensively; the result has a popular-fiction readability and momentum that more self-conscious literary novels often lack.
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