Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell · first published 1936
6% recommend94% neutral
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...
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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…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗There's a lot of sophistication in "primitive" agriculture. Humans have always been as intelligent and ambitious as they are today; they just didn't always have today's tools. Yams always make me think of Gone with the Wind. The climax of Act III (not labeled as such, but stories are stories) is Scarlett O'Hara at her family's plantation. Yankee soldiers have come through and taken every scrap of food, but they didn't recognize…
on “Yam, cultivate and cook” ↗The list of banned books is incomplete. For instance, Gone with the Wind was banned in ~~Alameda~~ Anaheim[0], but California is listed as having no banned books. Students should have access to any books they are likely to have heard of or are of educational value. [0] https://bbark.deepforestproductions.com/column/2013/04/07/ba...
on “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools” ↗…Dubliners by James Joyce 7. Lorna Doone by Richard Doddridge Blackmore 8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig 9. M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker 10. Carrie by Stephen King 11. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 12. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle 13. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison by Charles Shaw 14. Dune by Frank Herbert And direct links if you want to read more about an individual…
on “14 Best-Selling Books Repeatedly Rejected by Publishers” ↗Relying on literary adaptations is a symptom of Hollywood's decline from the golden age of The Maltese Falcon (1941 remake of a 1931 adaptation of a 1930 novel), Gone with the Wind (from the bestseller by Margaret Mitchell) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (way more than a hundred years old in 1938)? The reason most Hollywood material is adapted material, is that a movie is a hell…
on “How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick” ↗…Even the biggest novels top out at around 1000 pages. The fattest single-volume mass-market paperback novels I have seen other people actually reading are King's _It_, Michener's _Hawaii_, Mitchell's _Gone With the Wind_, and Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_. Those might last the whole week, if you spent most of it napping. That said, I recommend it be done on a sandy beach or on a hammock rather than the couch, and at least…
on “The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost” ↗…https://piedmontmastergardeners.org/article/sweet-potatoes/ I'm guessing maybe the issue is that yam can refer to sweet potatoes as well as tubers from unrelated species. Did she have a sweet potato or some other tuber in Gone With the Wind?
on “Yam, cultivate and cook” ↗Your article doesn't say that Alameda County banned Gone with the Wind. Alameda County has multiple school districts within it. Which one are you claiming banned the book, and where is the evidence?
on “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools” ↗…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
on “Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works” ↗…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction As a specific US example, see "The Wind Done Gone", "a bestselling historical novel that tells an alternative account of the story in the American novel Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. While the story of Gone with the Wind focuses on the life of the daughter of a wealthy slave owner, Scarlett O'Hara, The Wind Done Gone tells the story of the life of one…
on “The Last Ringbearer” ↗Ironically my own HS curriculum had us both read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and watch Gone With the Wind precisely because of their racist content (that is, as a way of understanding and critiquing racism in everyday culture). I can totally understand bringing TKAM down a few notches in the canon, and bringing…
on “'To Kill a Mockingbird,' Other Books Banned from California Schools” ↗….NET code, that appears to run as intended, for my startup's Web site. For calendars, right, that's important data. Sooooo, I wrote some software that is correct back to Pope Gregory. E.g., can read Gone with the Wind, look up the date of the firing on Fort Sumter, and then know the day of the big BBQ! But my plain text calendar program just prints out for any given year, for each month, a traditional calendar format,…
on “Plain Text Calendar” ↗…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%
on “ChatGPT Secret Training Data: The Top Books AI Bots Are Reading” ↗…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.
on “The new literalism plaguing today’s movies” ↗> 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.
on “About 10% of AMC movie showings sell zero tickets. This site finds them” ↗