“…tomorrow is another day.”
In a rare interview with the Atlanta Journal in 1936, Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell described her debut (and only) novel, Gone With The Wind, as “…the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction. The book isn’t strictly a book about the war, nor is it a historical novel. It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time.” While this is an accurate summary of the novel, this is quite a terse overview of the top bestseller of all time. Gone With The Wind is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, but it offers the revisionist mythology of the American South before, during, and after the Civil War, from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. While the prose in Gone With The Wind is gripping throughout the novel, no review of this novel would be complete without a swift condemnation of its inaccurate, disappointing, vulgar, and dehumanizing portrayal of black people in the novel. Throughout the book, African Americans are characterized as essentially one-dimensional simpletons who are incompetent, untrustworthy, ill-educated, child-like, bestial and in need of strong guidance from a genteel but domineering white aristocracy. Many black characters are compared to animals or children, with frequent references to “darkies” and “negroes.” This blatantly racist tone is pervasive throughout the novel and it casts a dark pall over an otherwise compelling tale of epic romance –albeit an extraordinarily dense work of commercial fiction (the original first edition of Gone With The Wind was published by MacMillan was 1,037 pages long).
Our central protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara, a frustratingly flighty, selfish, and spoiled Southern belle. She lives on her family’s vast North Georgia cotton plantation, and she comes of age right on the cusp of the Civil War, however she cares little for political affairs. Her days are spent in frivolity –fretting over dresses and parties, and toying with young men who might become potential suitors like the Tarleton twins. In these early passages in the novel, Mitchell provides a brief but telling summary of the antebellum South when describing Scarlett’s Irishman father, Gerald O’Hara:
“He liked the South, and he soon became, in his own opinion, a Southerner. There was much about the South – and Southerners – that he would never comprehend; but, with the whole-heartedness that was his nature, he adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them, for his own – poker and horse racing, red-hot politics and the code duello, States’ Rights and damnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and exaggerated courtesy to women. He even learned to chew tobacco. There was no need for him to acquire a good head for whiskey, he had been born with one” (62).
The Civil War is merely the setting of Gone With The Wind, but the central tension lies in Scarlett’s hidden love for her neighbor –a graceful, blonde, country gentleman named Ashley Wilkes who is betrothed to his shy but innocently lady-like cousin, Melanie. On the other hand, Scarlett is pursued by a curt and arrogant scallawag named Rhett Butler. While neither Ashley nor Rhett are particularly supportive of the war, Ashley is overwhelmed by a sense of patriotic duty to his home state when Georgia secedes from the Union. Rhett, on the other hand, is unimpressed by the foolhardy men of the South. However, Rhett is a reviled man for his blockade-running activities and for managing a seedy prostitution business. He maintains neutral commercial activities both North and South of the Mason-Dixon line throughout the war, while serving as the voice of reason in noting the impossibility of victory for the South due to an extensive network of Yankee resources, technology, manufacturing, and manpower –he characterizes the Confederacy’s call to war as Quixotic and naïve.
As the novel progresses, the war explodes with much excitement and enthusiasm in the South. Scarlett hurriedly marries a young suitor named Charles Hamilton in a foolish attempt to make Ashley jealous, but her new husband soon dies of a disease while en route to the front, leaving Scarlett pregnant and alone with a child. And despite her obligatory public displays of mourning, she moves to Atlanta and quickly begins attending parties and engaging in playful banter with the unscrupulous Rhett Butler while he is in town (much to the pearl-clutching chagrin of the ladies of Atlanta). She visits her Aunt’s home along with her sister-in-law Melanie (now pregnant with Ashley’s child), while helping tend to the wounded soldiers as a steady stream of Confederate soldiers continue to retreat and fall back to Atlanta. Just as Melanie goes into labor, the Union army begins to attack the city of Atlanta. In desperation, Scarlett serendipitously finds Rhett Butler who helps them escape the tumult while Atlanta is torched to the ground. The loss of Atlanta essentially spells the end for the Confederacy –a shock to many prideful Southerners.
In the second half of the novel, Scarlett quickly grows up and learns to fend for herself. She returns to her family’s plantation, Tara, and becomes a survivalist, caring and providing for a postpartum Melanie, along with her ill and depressed father who is saddened by the loss of his wife, as well as other members of the house –including a handful of former slaves who have chosen to remain at Tara. Together, they raise livestock, pick cotton, and grow vegetables to survive. Ever-present is the threat of Union soldiers or Sherman’s troops storming through their land. In these troublling scenes, Northern Yankees are portrayed as villainous, fearsome, greedy, and a-moral. At one point, Scarlett displays her own gumption by killing a stray Union soldier who enters her house under the auspices of robbing and raping the women inside. As the hero, Scarlett becomes the de facto leader of the household. Her strength gives Gone With The Wind a distinctly feminist narrative undertone as her strength proves to be the salvation of the people who surround her. However, as Reconstruction begins, the Radical Republicans take control of everything in Georgia and they begin to brutally punish former Confederate sympathizers with permanent indebtedness and prison, but for those who are not imprisoned, the punishment is disenfranchisement or a levying of exorbitant taxes. With little money to spare, Scarlett travels to Atlanta to beg Rhett Butler for financial assistance only to find that he too has been imprisoned. She offers herself as his mistress in exchange for money but an amused Rhett simply claims he has no access to his own money. Meanwhile, Ashley stumbles his way to Tara after surviving a Union prison camp. Now, with more mouths to feed, Scarlett grows desperate. By happenstance, she runs into an old acquaintance, Frank Kennedy, a gentleman from the antebellum days. Although he is betrothed to Scarlett’s neighbor, she quickly concocts a lie and marries Frank for his money anyway, an act which saves Tara but earns Scarlett the ire of her neighbors.
In order to secure herself a lasting income, Scarlett uses her husband’s money to build a lumber mill which quickly grows into a successful business in spite of Republican efforts to thwart any efforts of Southern enterprise. In these scenes, the entire social order of Georgia is cast aside as crime and lawlessness arises. However, Scarlett grows arrogant with her successful business and one night she rides through a notorious shantytown filled with vagrants where two men attempt to rob her, leading to the emergence of a new “vigilante” group to seek vengeance on the vagrants –it is the birth of the notorious Ku Klux Klan. In the ensuing chaos, Scarlett’s husband Frank Kennedy is killed but Rhett Butler saves Ashley Wilkes from imprisonment by providing a shady alibi –he claims the men were drinking all night at a local brothel (which, as it turns out, is owned by Rhett Butler). The story checks out and Ashley is allowed to recover from his wounds without further inquiry.
Almost immediately after Frank’s death, Rhett Butler proposes marriage to Scarlett and, in a heated passion, she agrees. They honeymoon in New Orleans while spending Rhett’s vast sums of money before returning to Atlanta –to Peachtree Street– where they build a house near Scarlett’s dwelling during the Union Army’s assault years earlier. In time, Scarlett gives birth to a baby girl, much to her chagrin, and Rhett nicknames the girl “bonnie” because of her blue eyes –an allusion to the “bonnie blue flag,” an early flag of the Confederacy. Rhett dotes upon bonnie day and night, and he proudly takes her on carriage rides around town. One day, Scarlett visits her lumber mill where Ashley is now employed and they reminisce about the old days before the war, but while caught up in nostalgia they are spotted together and the scene is mistaken for impropriety. It causes a great scandal amidst the gentry of Atlanta, and Rhett Butler grows furious. He drags Scarlett to a party in order to embarrass her, and in the evening (Mitchell suggests) Rhett sexually assaults his own wife. Perhaps it need not be said, but Gone With The Wind is filled with all manner of shameful acts that shocked early 20th century readers and continue to remain scandalous to this day. It’s engaging prose masks some deeply insidious themes that appeal to the worst impulses in American society. At any rate, Scarlett becomes pregnant with another child, but in a fight with Rhett she violently lunges at him and accidentally falls down a flight of stairs, breaking her ribs and causing a miscarriage.
With her life and reputation seemingly in tatters, Scarlett flees home to Tara to recuperate with her children:
“They left the village behind and turned into the red road to Tara. A faint pink still lingered about the edges of the sky and fat feathery clouds were tinged with gold and palest green. The stillness of the country twilight came down about them as calming as a prayer. How had she ever borne it, she thought, away for all these months, away from the fresh smell of country air, the plowed earth and the sweetness of summer nights? The moist red earth smelled so good, so familiar, so friendly, she wanted to get out and scoop up a handful. The honeysuckle which draped the gullied red sides of the road in tangled greenery was piercingly fragrant as always after the rain, the sweetest perfume. Above their heads a flock of chimney swallows whirled suddenly on swift wings and now and then a rabbit scurried startled on the road, his white tail bobbing like an eiderdown powder puff. She saw with pleasure that the cotton stood well, as they passed between plowed fields were the green bushes reared themselves sturdily out of the red earth. How beautiful all this was! The soft gray mist in the swampy bottoms, the red earth and growing cotton, the sloping fields with curving green rows and the black pines rising behind everything like sable walls. How had she ever stayed in Atlanta so long?” (645-646).
However, tragedy soon strikes again. Bonnie falls during a horse-jumping accident, much like her grandfather, and the fall tragically snaps her neck. Her death causes Rhett to tumble into a deep, alcoholic depression just as Melanie Wilkes becomes pregnant again, which forces her already frail body to grow deathly sick again. Scarlett speaks with Melanie just before her death. Scarlett also speaks with Ashley and she finally realizes that she does not love him anymore. Maybe she only ever loved the idea of Ashley –his sense of morality, propriety, dignity, and patriotism. In truth, Ashley is little more than an effeminate relic of the old Southern aristocracy –incapable of caring for himself or his own business interests, blinded by his own pride and stubbornness. Rhett Butler describes Ashley as follows:
“…Ashley Wilkes-bah! His breed is of no use or value in an upside-down world like ours. Whenever the world is up-ends, his kind is the first to perish. And why not? They don’t deserve to survive because they won’t fight – don’t know how to fight. This isn’t the first time the world’s been upside-down and it won’t be the last. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. And when it does happen everyone loses everything and everyone is equal.” (Rhett Butler defaming Ashley Wilkes to Scarlett pg 719).
Scarlett runs to Rhett Butler in love and hope, finally realizing he is the only man she has ever truly loved, but her dreams are soon dashed as he apparently has already moved on, uttering the book’s most famous line:
“My dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The novel ends as Scarlett has finally overcome her girlish infatuation with Ashley Wilkes at long last, but despite retreating like a wilted flower in the face of Rhett’s rejection, Scarlett is filled with hope for the the future, of winning back the love of Rhett Butler …for “tomorrow is another day.”
The title of Gone With The Wind is derived from the third stanza of an 1894 poem by English writer, Ernest Dowson. It refers to a deep loss of love that will never be regained, while an age that is ‘gone with the wind’ in the novel refers to the old antebellum Southern aristocracy, an agrarian economy of gentlemen farmers, as well as a caste system predicated on abject human enslavement, as the wind that sweeps through Georgia decimates an entire way of life, and the soft romantic aristocrats of yesteryear are left behind while the hardened survivalists are the only people who endure.
Ironically, while on the surface Gone With The Wind presents readers with a potent cocktail of deep nostalgia for the false memory of the Antebellum South, the only characters who manage to survive this tempest that essentially destroys the Old South are those who actually look forward to a better future –not the reactionaries who look backward. In a unique twist, it is the self-seeking, ignoble, and unpatriotic people who are shown to be the truly impressive, enduring heroes while other meeker characters, who wistfully yearn for a return to the soft slave-owning aristocracy of antebellum, are shown to be undesirable. These gentler characters, like Ashley Wilkes, are cast to the wayside amidst Sherman’s infamous barn-burning march through Georgia, as farms, plantations, and railroads are all destroyed. In the novel, this unique historical moment of total war looms heavily over Southerners as Sherman’s troops eventually torch and loot the city of Atlanta –a key metropolitan junction for the Confederacy. Personally, I had never truly grasped the sheer tactical importance of the city of Atlanta prior to reading this novel, nor did I fully understand how small of a city Atlanta was at the time. As Mitchell conveys, much of the South was rural, pastoral, and agricultural with only a few towns and cities –Atlanta was an important city primarily because of its railroad intersection connecting Georgia to the ports of Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, and therefore it was a hub of communication and trade, as well as a gathering place to care for wounded soldiers.
At any rate, the central theme of the Gone With The Wind is survivalism. Which characters have the necessary gumption to endure and display the traits of leadership in times of extreme turmoil? Who are the characters that survive the aftermath of the Civil War? And why? Margaret Mitchell’s subtext in Gone With The Wind asks us to dismiss the soft, genteel Southern aristocrats like Ashley Wilkes, and instead look to the heroic independence of self-seeking survivalists like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.
As a final comment, in my own view, Gone With The Wind hardly rises above the rank of popular commercial fiction –it is a best-selling romance novel and represents a pop culture phenomenon, but it is not among the great works of American literature. The fact that it won a Pulitzer Prize is a shameful stain on the legacy of the Pulitzers. As one of Margaret Mitchell’s sources of inspiration for the novel, she apparently drew upon the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr., who was a key voice in the early 20th century resurgence of American white nationalism, the Ku Klux Klan, and re-writing the history of slavery as essentially an anodyne, orderly, pleasant way of life, or at least strongly preferable to the movement for abolitionism. Dixon’s works also inspired D.W. Griffith’s disgracefully racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first big budget movie in the United States which also portrayed black people as bestial, child-like, untrustworthy, and immoral. And this vile, ugly mythology can also be found within the imperialist “White Man’s Burden” narrative as well as the preposterous “Lost Cause” revisionist narrative. Pandering politicians like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump have exploited these tall tales for their own benefit, and likewise supposedly contrarian, iconoclastic internet provocateurs have also perpetuated these stories in recent years. Thankfully in later decades, the Pulitzer Prize was able to more clearly distinguish itself from the clamor of popular opinion, and instead strive to pursue truly great literature. At least the inclusion of Gone With The Wind among the Pulitzer Prize-winners forces readers to engage in fearless conversation about the troubling historical narratives that some Americans have chosen to embrace as sacrosanct.
The 1937 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The selection of Gone With The Wind as a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 was understandably controversial. At the time, there was a growing chorus of accusations exposing the rampant racism throughout the novel, and the Pulitzer Prize decision was also criticized for caving to popular opinion in selecting a bestseller, or what literary critic W.J. Stuckey calls “the apotheosis of the super-popular.” Should the Pulitzer Prize be a mere recognition of commercial success? The Pulitzer has long been a delicate balancing act, swaying between commercial popularity and literary excellence. Notably, in 1937 the Pulitzer Jury chose to overlook William Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom! and John Dos Passos Big Money.
The 1937 Novel Jury was composed of the same three members for the eighth and final year in a row: Jefferson Fletcher, Robert Lovett, and Albert Paine (he died later that year in 1937). This trio would be the longest serving consecutive Novel Jury. Apparently, in 1937 they provided a list to the Pulitzer Advisory Board of the top 6 novels recommended for the award —Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Last Puritan by George Santayana, Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmond, The Three Bags by Roger Burlingame, Mountain Path by Harriette Simpson, and Yang and Yin by Alice Tisdale Hobart. There were four additional novels considered: In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck, Green Margins by E.P. O’Donnell, Of Lena Geyer by Marcia Davenport, The Enchanted Journey by Robert Nathan. The two novels at the top of the list were Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan. They wrote to the Advisory Board in a report listing Gone With The Wind and The Last Puritan. The Pulitzer Advisory Board simply unilaterally selected Gone With The Wind.
- Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
- Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.
Today (as recently as 2014) Americans continue to rank Gone With The Wind as among their favorite books, second only to The Bible. Nevertheless, controversies continue to plague the novel. Gone With The Wind has frequently found its way onto lists of banned books (remarkably the Nazis banned the book in Germany in the 1930s), and even as recently as 2020, an online video streaming service removed the 1939 classic film adaptation from their selection out of a fear of featuring racist content on their service (Gone With The Wind was later re-added with a detailed introduction discussing its racist content). As with many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels on my list, reading Gone With The Wind has been strangely timely for me. Amidst continuing demands for a national conversation on race in America, following the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing “Black Lives Matter” protests and riots, reading Gone With The Wind serves as a difficult reminder of our nation’s unpleasant past.
According to former Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg, in 1937: “The Advisory Board, like the American public, wasted no time in embracing Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, the endearing figures in the most popular and enduring of all Civil War romances. As usual, the critical buffeting of Gone With The Wind as a best-selling Pulitzer selection was strong and merciless but this time the hard-pressed Advisory Board was proved right. For with the passage of time, Margaret Mitchell’s story became a part of American folklore –a novel that was read by millions of people inside and outside the country, a movie that was shown and reshown, and shown on television to a new generation, even a musical drama that originated in Japan with an all-Japanese cast singing a score by the American composer, Harold Rome. Whatever the critics may have thought of the book’s sentiment and magnolia-scented romance, the public loved it and still does. Gone With The Wind was an eminently defensible choice.”
Who Is Margaret Mitchell?
Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was raised among the traditions and mythology of the old South. She grew up hearing fabled stories of the time before the war, as well as the difficult days of Reconstruction. Her father, Eugene Mitchell, was an attorney and historian of the Civil War, particularly with regard to Georgia. In one of the few interviews she gave, Margaret Mitchell recalled that her father could recite every single battle of the Atlanta campaign, the names of the commanding officers, and even if they were shot and where. Her mother and brother were also amateur Civil War historians.
Mitchell briefly attended Smith College for what she later described as a miserable period of her life (at one point she refused to attend a class because a black student was also in attendance), but when her stern, disciplinarian mother died she returned home and never finished college. She surprisingly married a scoundrel named Berrien Kinnard Upshaw (or simply “Red”) and since he did not have a job, the newly married couple moved in with Mitchell’s disapproving father but he turned out to be an abusive man who eventually abandoned her. Mitchell divorced him after two years of marriage (he later died falling off the second floor of a flop-house). In 1922, at the age of twenty-two, Mitchell began working as a writer for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine (she was one of the first female reporters in the state of Georgia). A few years later she married John R. Marsh and left her job due to recurring injuries, including an ankle injury. Bored and restless, she began writing her epic, Gone With The Wind. Her writing style was haphazard –she typed some pages here and there while scribbling down others on handwritten notes, and various editions and pages were hidden around her house. Only a few close friends of Mitchell’s actually knew about the book. For nine years Mitchell continued writing and re-writing the manuscript.
One day, a publishing agent named Harold Latham from the MacMillan Company was touring through the South hunting for new literary talent. A friend referred Mitchell, and the rest is history. After a few months of editing and changes, Gone With The Wind went on sale on June 30, 1936 and it quickly became a national phenomenon –a pleasantly surprising situation for everyone involved. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 amidst both celebration and controversy. Apparently, when Margaret Mitchell received her congratulatory phone call for the Pulitzer Prize, she simply continued with her evening routine, which included attending service at a black church. The press hunted for her all over Atlanta but they never did find her.
She was often asked if she would ever write another book, but Mitchell always responded that she was far too busy being the full-time author of Gone With The Wind to find the time to write anything else. She was paid $50,000 for the rights to the film by David O. Selznick –a massive sum in those days– and the incredible technicolor film later won Best Picture in 1939 (read my review of the film here). Margaret Mitchell attended the premiere for the film at the Loew’s Theatre in Atlanta, alongside the mayor of Atlanta, Producer David Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and a cohort of surviving Confederate Civil War veterans. The whole city was filled with cheering crowds and parties honoring the old South.
In the wake of persistent accusations of racism in her writings, in the 1990s it was later revealed that Margaret Mitchell had been anonymously funding the education of many Black/African-American medical students to attend Morehouse College throughout her lifetime. In fact, she risked her life to do so. In addition, she was outspoken about the plight of women in America –she was a flapper girl and a debutante in her 20s, as well as a tomboy. Her mother was an early suffragette. As with most writers, a greater degree of complexity lurks just beneath the surface and this axiom holds true for the enigmatic and reclusive Margaret Mitchell.
In 1949, while en route to see a movie with her husband on Peachtree Street in Atlanta –a street that ironically plays an important role in Gone With The Wind— Margaret Mitchell was struck and killed by an off duty cab driver. She was only 48 years old. Gone With The Wind was the only novel she ever published in her lifetime. She never had any children,
Years later, another short romantic novella surfaced that she wrote in her teenage years and it was eventually posthumously published and entitled Lost Laysen. In 1991, a sequel to Gone With The Wind authorized by the Mitchell estate was published entitled Scarlett (1991) by Alexandra Ripley –it was a bestseller, but was lambasted by critics. The same could be said of other authorized prequels, sequels, and re-imaginings of the Gone With The Wind narrative, such as Rhett Butler’s People (2007) by Donald McCaig (which was also authorized by the Mitchell estate).
In 2011, Mitchell’s nephew Joseph Mitchell passed away. He left fifty percent of trademark and literary rights of the Margaret Mitchell Estate, as well as some personal belongings of his aunt’s, to the Archdiocese of Atlanta.
Film Adaptation:
- Gone with the Wind (1939)
- Director: Victor Fleming
- Starring: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland
Literary Context in 1936-1937:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1936): awarded to American playwright Eugene O’Neill “for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy.”
- Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestseller in 1936 was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Other notable bestsellers that year included: The Last Puritan by George Santayana, Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds, It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.
- Jewish booksellers throughout Nazi Germany were deprived of their Reich Publications Chamber membership cards, preventing them from selling books.
- The Greek poet and Communist activist Yiannis Ritsos was inspired to write his poem Epitaphios by a photograph of a dead protester at a massive tobacco workers’ demonstration in Thessaloniki. When it was published, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power in Greece and copies were burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens.
- The 38-year-old Spanish dramatist, Federico García Lorca, was arrested by Francoist militia during the White Terror and was never seen alive again. His brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, the leftist mayor of Granada, was shot on the same day.
- The Carnegie Medal for excellence in children’s literature is inaugurated by the Library Association in the United Kingdom.
- The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos was published.
- Double Indemnity by James M. Cain was published.
- Agatha Christie published three Poirot novels: The A. B. C. Murders, Cards on the Table, and Murder in Mesopotamia.
- The Big Money by John Dos Passos was published.
- Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier was published.
- Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds was published.
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner was published.
- In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Not unlike The Good Earth before it, the Pulitzer Prize for Gone with the Wind represents more of an acknowledgement of a widespread cultural phenomenon, rather than a true honor for literary excellence. While Gone with the Wind is an undeniably well-crafted novel, its plain thematic nostalgia for a supposedly carefree, peaceful antebellum age of plantation slavery is deeply troubling. For those willing to read between the lines, Margaret Mitchell has buried a subtle critique of the fabled, soft-minded “Southern Gentleman” in this novel, while also praising the gritty survivalist characters who possess true “gumption.” But it comes at a great cost. At any rate, Gone with the Wind is an important book, but not one I would rank highly in the American canon –its subject matter continues to be praised by racist organizations to this very day. Alternatively, I would have considered Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner for the Pulitzer Prize instead, though in hindsight, it’s hard to image the Pulitzer Prize choosing any other book besides Gone with the Wind.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With The Wind. Scribner, New York, New York, 1996.