Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 60 years after its initial publication, its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and the most beloved work by an American writer...
Stats for nerds
1recommend
17mentions
17people
2009–2026years
6% recommend94% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I remember that feeling well, although I’d some prior experience with surprisingly short/not long enough books (Gone with the Wind is sometimes described as “the shortest long book ever” for similar reasons).
Les Misérables is probably my second favorite but that took me so many times longer to make my way through, probably because of Victor Hugo’s unfortunate tendency to go so off track, interjecting with two hundred page history lessons describing his favorite scenes from Waterloo.
- Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.
Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.
- May I submit these? Didn't see these after many refreshes:
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French." - Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins
"When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." - Harper Lee. To Kill A Mockingbird
"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."- Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind
- > Any portrayal is a betrayal.
For those sufficiently pedantic, true. OTOH, there's a rather wide spectrum in how well (say) Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Ken Burns's The Civil War, and McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom portray the U.S. Civil War.
- Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.
I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.
Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
- Tl;dr gpt4 seems to have detailed knowledge of the following copyrighted books (The first half of the list)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone J.K. Rowling 76%
1984 George Orwell 57%
The Fellowship of the Ring J.R.R. Tolkien 51%
Fifty Shades of Grey E.L. James 49%
The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins 48%
Lord of the Flies William Golding 43%
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 43%
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 30%
The Silmarillion J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien 28%
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 27%
A Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin 27%
The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown 26%
Dune Frank Herbert 26%
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 25%
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 25%
Casino Royale Ian Fleming 24%
Neuromancer William Gibson 22%
Ender's Game Orson Scott Card 20%
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 19%
Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell 18%
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 17%
The Lost Symbol Dan Brown 16%
Inferno Dan Brown 15%
Divergent Veronica Roth 15%
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 15%
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1 recommend · 6
The Wind in the Willows
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The Name of the Wind
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To Kill a Mockingbird
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Wind, Sand and Stars
12 recommend · 28
The Other Wind
2 recommend · 7
To Kill A Mocking Bird
9 recommend · 18
