Mitchell Wins Pulitzer for Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's only novel had sold a million copies in six months, broken every publishing record in American history, and consumed the reading public like no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin. When Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 3, 1937, the award merely confirmed what bookstores already knew: the 1,037-page Civil War romance had become a cultural phenomenon that transcended literary categories. Mitchell, a former Atlanta Journal reporter, had worked on the manuscript in secret for nearly a decade, writing the last chapter first and filling in the middle over years of sporadic effort. She never intended to publish it. A Macmillan editor visiting Atlanta in 1935 heard about the manuscript from a mutual friend, and Mitchell reluctantly handed over a stack of manila envelopes so disorganized that chapters were out of order and some existed in multiple drafts. The novel told the story of Scarlett O'Hara against the backdrop of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Georgia, combining a romantic plot with detailed historical settings drawn from Mitchell's family stories and years of research. Macmillan published it on June 30, 1936, with a first printing of 10,000 copies. Within three weeks, the publisher was reprinting 50,000 copies at a time and still could not meet demand. Critics were divided. Some praised the novel's narrative power and historical sweep. Others, including many Black writers and scholars, condemned its romanticized portrayal of plantation slavery and its sympathetic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. The book's enormous popularity cemented Lost Cause mythology in the popular imagination for generations. David O. Selznick's 1939 film adaptation amplified the novel's cultural reach exponentially. The movie won ten Academy Awards and became the highest-grossing film in history when adjusted for inflation, a record it still holds. Mitchell, who received $50,000 for the film rights, never wrote another novel. She died after being struck by a car in Atlanta in 1949.