Margaret Mitchell was an American novelist best known for writing Gone with the Wind. Published in 1936, Gone with the Wind was a commercial and critical success, selling over 30 million copies worldwide. It depicts the struggles of Scarlett O'Hara during and after the American Civil War in Georgia. Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1937. The novel was adapted into a highly successful 1939 film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Mitchell was struck by a car in 1949 and died from her injuries, leaving Gone with the Wind as her only published novel during her lifetime.

1. UZBEKISTAN STATE WORLD LANGUAGES
UNIVERSITY
Margaret Mitchell – her life and work.
Peculiarities of her novel
‘Gone with the wind’
Group: XTI-2034
Student: Javohir Pahlavonov

2. INTRODUCTION
Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was an American
novelist, journalist and the author of Gone With
the Wind,one of the most popular books of all
time. The novel was published in 1936 and sold
more than a million copies in the first six
months, a phenomenal feat considering it was
the Great Depression era. More than 30 million
copies of this masterpiece, set during the Civil
War (1861-65), have been sold worldwide in
thirty-eight countries.

3. It has been translated into twenty-seven
languages. Approximately 250,000 copies are
still sold each year. Shortly after the book’s
publication the movie rights were sold to David
O. Selznick for $50,000, the highest amount ever
paid for a manuscript up to that time. In 1937
Margaret Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize.In recent years long after her death, a
collection of Mitchell’s girlhood writings and a
novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost
Laysen, have been published.

4. Mitchell wrote this romance novella, when she
was fifteen years old (1916). She gave Lost
Laysen, which she had written in two notebooks,
to a boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. He died in 1945
and the novella remained undiscovered among
some letters she had written to him until 1994.
The novella was published in 1996, eighty years
after it was written, and became a New York
Times Best Seller. A collection of newspaper
articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta
Journal was republished in book form.

5. Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner, a
native and lifelong resident of Georgia.
She was born in 1900 into a wealthy and
politically prominent family. Her
father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an
attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel
"Maybelle" Stephens, was a suffragist
and Catholic activist. She had two
brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell,
who died in infancy in 1894, and
Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in
1896.

6. Margaret Mitchell spent her early childhood
on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta.
Her family lived near her maternal
grandmother, Annie Stephens, in a Victorian
house painted bright red with yellow trim.
Mrs. Stephens had been a widow for several
years prior to Margaret’s birth; Captain John
Stephens died in 1896. After his death, she
inherited property on Jackson Street where
Margaret’s family lived.

7. Young Margaret read “boys’ stories” by G.A.
Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys
series by Edward Stratemeyer. Her mother read
Mary Johnston’s novels to her before she could
read. She also read the plays of William
Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and
Sir Walter Scott. Mitchell’s two favorite children’s
books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children
and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet
(1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even as an
adult and gave them as gifts.

8. In Mitchell’s teenage years, she is
known to have written a 400-page
novel about girls in a boarding school,
The Big Four. The novel is thought to be
lost; Mitchell destroyed some of her
manuscripts herself and others were
destroyed after her death.

9. Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding
automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street
at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband,
John Marsh, while on her way to see the
movie A Canterbury Tale on the evening of
August 11, 1949. She died at age 48 at Grady
Hospital five days later on August 16
without fully regaining consciousness.

10. Gone with the wind
Gone with the Wind was first published in
1936. The story is set in Clayton County and
Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American
Civil War and Reconstruction Era. 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”.

11. • Gone with the Wind was popular with American
readers from the outset and was the top American
fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. 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.
• Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for
the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film
of the same name, which has been considered to
be one of the greatest movies ever made and also
received the Academy Award for Best Picture
during the 12th annual Academy Awards
ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by
Mitchell published during her lifetime.

12. Margaret Mitchell arranged Gone with the Wind
chronologically, focusing it on the life and
experiences of the main character, Scarlett O’Hara,
as she grew from adolescence into adulthood.
During the time span of the novel, from 1861 to
1873, Scarlett ages from sixteen to twenty-eight
years. This is a type of Bildungsroman, a novel
concerned with the moral and psychological
growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood
(coming-of-age story). Scarlett’s development is
affected by the events of her time. Mitchell used a
smooth linear narrative structure. The novel is
known for its exceptional “readability”. The plot is
rich with vivid characters.

13. Plot elements
Slavery
Slavery in the United States in Gone with the
Wind is a backdrop to a story that is essentially
about other things. 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 the slaveholder and tends to present
slaves as docile and happy.

14. Caste system
The characters in the novel are organized into
two basic groups along class lines: the white
planter class, such as Scarlett and Ashley, and
the black house servant class. The slaves
depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily
loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork,
Prissy, and Uncle Peter. House servants are
the highest “caste” of slaves in Mitchell’s
caste system.

15. The sales of Margaret Mitchell’s novel in the
summer of 1936, as the nation was recovering
from the Great Depression and at the virtually
unprecedented high price of three dollars,
reached about 1 million by the end of December.
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,
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.”

16. CONCLUSION
Anyone who hears the word “South America” will
always think “Gone with the Wind”.Margaret
Mitchell created cloudy memories of her ancestors
and a nostalgic southern image in her novel,
creating a false picture of Southern life in her novel,
thereby strengthening her point of view in the
American imagination. The book topped the
bestsellers, and its success surprised even the
author. The whole nation read about the betrayed
South, the North escaped the mercenary
catastrophe, and then watched the same in moving
pictures that reached a wider audience.

17. “Gone with the Wind” is still an important
work in America. The charm of Scarlett O’Hara,
the innocence of Melanie Hamilton, the
brilliance of Rett Butler, or the compliment of
Ashley Wilkes are irresistible. The stunning
images of houses and plantations stop the
reader from thinking about the truth about war
and slavery and ignore the torturers from the
north. People in the 1930s and 1940s were
easily drawn into the illusion long before the
American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968).

18. This utopian depiction of the South exists only
in novels and films. And only the NAACP
protested against these pervasive African-
American stereotypes. In the end, Margaret
Mitchell’s novel left us with a curved portrait of
the south painted with the American holiday of
the 1930s and the southern superstitions of her
family. Therefore, only in the context of its
origin can we fully understand the essence of
the work and give full information about its
significance.

19. THANK YOU FOR ATTENTION