One Thousand Pages, One Sensation: 'Gone with the Wind' Is Published
On June 30, 1936, Macmillan published an unknown Atlanta journalist's only novel — and 'Gone with the Wind' became an instant publishing phenomenon.
Margaret Mitchell hoped her novel would sell 5,000 copies, so her publisher would not lose money. It sold ten times that on its first day.
Gone with the Wind was published on June 30, 1936, by Macmillan — a 1,037-page first novel by an author almost no one had heard of. Mitchell had been a reporter for the Atlanta Journal until injuries forced her to quit in 1926. Confined to her small Atlanta apartment, she began writing on a Remington typewriter, a gift from her second husband, John R. Marsh — telling the story of an Atlanta belle she first called Pansy O'Hara.
Mitchell wrote in secret for the better part of a decade, drawing on stories she had heard from relatives and from Confederate veterans she met as a girl. She eventually showed the manuscript to Harold Latham, an editor from Macmillan in New York, who urged her to finish it — with one change: the heroine's name. Pansy became Scarlett.
The book was a sensation from the moment it appeared. It had been chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and advance orders were extraordinary for a first novel of such length. Readers devoured the saga of Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and the burning of Atlanta as the Civil War and Reconstruction swept away the Old South. The novel was the best-selling work of fiction in the United States in both 1936 and 1937, and in 1937 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Hollywood came calling: producer David O. Selznick paid Mitchell a record $50,000 for the film rights.
The story's triumph came with a shadow that has only deepened with time. Mitchell's sweeping romance presents a romanticized view of the antebellum South, and critics — in 1936 and today — have noted that it does not confront the horrors of slavery. The book remains beloved and widely read, and widely argued about: more than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.
Gone with the Wind was Mitchell's only novel published in her lifetime, yet it became one of the best-selling books in history. Its 1939 film adaptation, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett, became a cultural phenomenon, winning eight Academy Awards. Ninety years on, the story of Scarlett O'Hara endures as both a landmark of American storytelling and a reminder that the stories a nation loves say as much about it as the stories it tells.
Photo: MGM trailer screenshot, restored by Wilfredor — public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
