Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. It was popular with American readers from the onset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937 on the row. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide. The sales of Margaret Mitchell's novel in the summer of 1936, at the virtually unprecedented price of three dollars, reached about one million by the end of December. Because it was released in the era of the Great Depression and Mitchell worried the high $3.00 price would ruin its chance for success. Actually the book was a bestseller by the time reviews began to appear in national magazines. Herschel Brickell, a critic for the New York Evening Post, praised Mitchell for the way she "tosses out the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years." One criticism by literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, leveled at Gone with the Wind, is for its portrayal of African Americans in the 19th century South. Former field hands during the early days of Reconstruction are described behaving "as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild~either from wrong pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance." In Gone with the Wind Mitchell is blind to racial oppression and 'the inseparability of race and gender" that defines the southern belle character of Scarlett, according to Patricia Yaeger. Yet there are complexities in the way that Mitchell dealt with racial issues. Scarlett was asked by a Yankee woman for advice on who to appoint as a nurse for her children; Scarlett suggested a "darky", much to the disgust of the Yankee woman who was seeking an Irish maid, a "Bridget". African Americans and Irish Americans are treated "in precisely the same way" in Gone with the Wind, writes David O'Connell in his 1996 book, The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchells Gone with the Wind. Ethnic slurs on the Irish and Irish stereotypes spread in every part of the novel, O'Connell claims, and Scarlett is not an exception to the insults. And apparently in the novel, the Irish American O'Haras were slaveholders whereas African Americans were held as slaves. Speaking on the subject of whether Gone with the Wind should be taught in schools, James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, says the novel should be taught in schools. Students should be told that Gone with the Wind presents the wrong view of slavery, Loewen states. Besides, the main complaint was that the racial slur "nigger" appears repeatedly in the novel. In the same complaint were several other books: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Another criticism of the novel is that it promotes plantation values. Mitchell biographer Marianne Walker, author of Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind, is of the opinion that those who believe Gone with the Wind promotes plantation values have not read the book. Walker states it is the popular 1939 film that "promotes a false notion of the Old South". She goes on to add that Mitchell had no involvement in the production of the film. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide would incorrectly think it was the true story of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film version of the novel "amplified this effect". Scholars of the period have written in recent years about the negative effects the novel has had on race relations. Among the four persons, who doesn't give positive comments on Gone with the Wind?
Herschel Brickell. David O'Connell. Patricia Yaeger. Marianne Walker.