Gone with the Wind

The famous epic novel "Gone with the Wind" by American writer Margaret Mitchell won the National Book Award in the United States in 1936 and the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It has been translated into dozens of languages around the world. In this edition, the text is translated by T. Ozerskaya and T. Kudryavtseva. The illustrations include sketches and drawings for the famous film, made in 1939 by director Victor Fleming, which won eight Oscars.
In 1936, Americans awarded their National Book Award to Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind. Literary critics and ordinary readers had no doubt that the prestigious award this outstanding female prose was not in vain. On the war between the North and the South American novelists have written many times before. However, the new novel differed from the already published works cardinally. The writer created her own version of the history of the South, which takes place before the eyes of a beautiful Southern woman, energetically building its fate and surviving in an era of social breakdown of society. In terms of plot, "Gone with the Wind" resembled an adventurous novel describing a love story, while at the same time an epic picture of the demise of the civilization of the plantation South unfolded before the readers. The novel, written during the "Jazz Age", in its style and spirit was clearly "Victorian". The intrigue was also that in the literary world Mitchell before the publication of her novel was not known to anyone. There was an impression that an ordinary housewife inexplicably created from scratch epic, which some critics compared with "War and Peace" Tolstoy. In fact, Mitchell's writing experience was. She began work on her novel in 1926. Before that, Margaret managed to work as a journalist in the Atlanta Journal, writing more than a hundred essays. Many of them were devoted to Confederate generals and prominent women of Georgia. Gathering material for her articles, Mitchell studied periodicals of the 60's, military memoirs of the South and summaries of military operations on the territory of Georgia. The writer had heard relatives and acquaintances talk about the Civil War since childhood. Both her grandfathers fought on the side of the Confederates, her grandmother told Margaret about the siege of Atlanta, and the father of the future writer, being the chairman of the local historical society, frankly despised the Yankees. The theme of the confrontation between North and South was Mitchell absorbed and deeply experienced. Therefore, when reading her novel and there is an "effect of presence". It seems that the author was an eyewitness to all the events described. Having started work on the novel, Mitchell was in no hurry. By this time she was married to an insurance agent and led a quiet life as a housewife. However, it was her position that allowed her to repeatedly rework individual pieces of her future novel, bringing the text to perfection. Mitchell wrote only about what was well known and familiar to her. The result was a timeless masterpiece that will forever go down in literary history.