It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea."

This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem "Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae", written by Ernest Dowson.

[4] The oldest of the three O'Hara daughters, 16-year-old Scarlett, is dismayed to learn that the man she secretly loves, her county neighbor Ashley Wilkes, is set to announce his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton.

Throughout the day, Scarlett attempts to turn Ashley's head by flirting with every man present, including Melanie's brother Charles Hamilton.

Melanie goes into labor with only the inexperienced Scarlett and a young enslaved woman called Prissy to assist, as all the trained doctors are attending to the soldiers.

However, the situation is bleak: Scarlett's mother is dead, her father has lost his mind with grief, her sisters are sick with typhoid fever, the enslaved field workers have left, the Yankees have burned all the cotton, and there is no food.

Rhett sarcastically asks if the father is Ashley; Scarlett calls him a cad and says that no woman would want his baby, to which he replies, "Cheer up, maybe you'll have a miscarriage.

In the wake of Melanie's death, Rhett has decided he wants to rediscover the calm Southern dignity he once knew in his youth and is leaving Atlanta to find it.

She grew up hearing stories about the American Civil War and the Reconstruction from her Irish-American grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, who had endured its suffering while living on the family plantation, Rural Home.

After Latham agreed to publish the book, Mitchell worked for another six months checking the historical references and rewriting the opening chapter several times.

[citation needed] Margaret Mitchell arranged Gone with the Wind chronologically, focusing on the life and experiences of the main character, Scarlett O'Hara, as she grew from adolescence into adulthood.

[61] Southern plantation fiction (also known as Anti-Tom literature, in reference to reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin of 1852) from the mid-19th century, culminating in Gone with the Wind, is written from the perspective and values of an enslaver and tends to present slaves as docile and happy.

While shot and shell thundered to release the shackles of slavery from her body and her soul – she loved, fought for, and protected – Us who held her in bondage, her "Marster" and her "Missus!"

[71] The best-selling anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852, is mentioned briefly in Gone with the Wind as being accepted by the Yankees as "revelation second only to the Bible".

Kathryn Lee Seidel, in her book, The Southern Belle in the American Novel, wrote: part of her does try to rebel against the restraints of a code of behavior that relentlessly attempts to mold her into a form to which she is not naturally suited.

[76]Scarlett, the figure of a pampered southern belle, lives through an extreme reversal of fortune and wealth and survives to rebuild Tara and her self-esteem.

[78] Although Scarlett was "born" around 1845, she is portrayed to appeal to modern-day readers for her passionate and independent spirit, determination, and obstinate refusal to feel defeated.

[84] Twenty-seven-year-old nurse Kate Cumming from Mobile, Alabama, described the primitive hospital conditions in her journal: They are in the hall, on the gallery, and crowded into very small rooms.

Once again, General Sherman flanks the Confederate army, forcing Johnston to retreat to Peachtree Creek (July 20), five miles northeast of Atlanta.

[21][94] Scarlett's love interest, Ashley Wilkes, lacks manliness, and her husbands – the "calf-like"[5] Charles Hamilton, and the "old-maid in britches",[5] Frank Kennedy – are unmanly as well.

[49] Herschel Brickell, a critic for the New York Evening Post, lauded 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.

Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild – either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.

Author Pat Conroy, in his preface to a later edition of the novel, describes Mitchell's portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as having "the same romanticized role it had in The Birth of a Nation and appears to be a benign combination of the Elks Club and a men's equestrian society".

[114] Regarding the historical inaccuracies of the novel, historian Richard N. Current points out: No doubt it is indeed unfortunate that Gone with the Wind perpetuates many myths about Reconstruction, particularly with respect to blacks.

[121] The novel came under intense criticism for alleged racist and white supremacist themes in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests and focus on systemic racism in the United States.

The stamp, designed by Howard Paine, displays the book with its original dust jacket, a white Magnolia blossom, and a hilt placed against a background of green velvet.

[154] One story of the legacy of Gone with the Wind is the persistence in the people's minds of its representation of the history of the Old South and how the American Civil War and Reconstruction changed it.

The novel appeals worldwide due to its universal themes: war, love, death, racial conflict, class, gender, and generation, which speak especially to women.

A federal appeals court denied the plaintiffs an injunction (Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin) against publication on the basis that the book was a parody and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

Away from copyright lawsuits, Internet fan fiction has proved to be a fertile medium for sequels (some of them book-length), parodies, and rewritings of Gone with the Wind.