Saturday Review
"...Miss Mitchell paints a broad canvas, an an exciting one. And, in spite of its length, the book moves swiftly and smoothly--a three-decker with all sails set. Miss Mitchell has lost neither her characters in her background nor her background in her characters, and her full-blooded story is in the best traditions of the historical novel. It is a good novel rather than a great one....Nevertheless, in 'Gone With the Wind' Miss Mitchell has written a solid and vividly interesting story of war and reconstruction, realistic in detail and told from an original point of view." - Stephen Vincent Benet 07/04/1936New York Times Book Review
"GONE WITH THE WIND is by no means a great novel. But it is a long while since the American reading public has been offered such a bounteous feast of excellent storytelling....[Scarlett] is a memorable figure in American fiction. But she lives in her own right, completely, and will, I suspect, for a long time to come....The remarkable thing about Miss Mitchell's portrait of [Rhett] is that is that she has taken a stock figure of melodrama and romance...and made him credible and alive." 07/05/1936 New York Post
"I can recall few books out of the thousands I have read since I began to write a daily column that left me feeling I'd much rather just go on thinking about them, savoring their truth and treasuring the emotional experience that reading them was, than to try and set down my impressions of them. This is the case with a novel you will hear much about in the months that are coming, and which you will read, in all probability. I am speaking of...'Gone With the Wind'." - Herschel Brickell 06/30/1936 New York Herald Tribune Book Review
"It is dramatic, even melodramatic; it is romantic and occasionally sentimental; it brazenly employs all of the trappings of the old-fashioned Southern romance, but it rises triumphantly over this material and becomes, if not a work of art, a dramatic re-creation of life itself." - Henry Steele Commager New Republic
"Miss Mitchell is afraid of no comparison and no emotion--she makes us weep at deathbed scenes (and really weep), exult at a sudden rescue and grit our teeth at the crimes of our relatives the damn Yankees. I would never, never say that she has written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her book has a simple-minded courage that suggests the great novelists of the past. No wonder it is going like the wind." - Malcom Cowley 09/16/1936 New York Times Book Review
"The historical background is the chief virtue of the book, and it is the story of the times rather than the unconvincing and somewhat absurd plot that gives Miss Mitchell's work whatever importance may be attached to it. How accurate this history is is for the expert to tell, but no reader cam come away without a sense of the tragedy that overcame the planting families in 1865 and without a better understanding of the background of present-day Southern life." - Ralph Thompson 06/30/1936 Reference Books
"The need to escape from an America which seemed, during the years of the Depression, inexplicably to have failed to fulfill all its golden promises must, in the nature of the case, have encouraged many readers to retreat to the past. Many persons found themselves fighting as bitter a battle for survival as Scarlett O'Hara herself after the Civil War. It was exhilarating to watch Scarlett fight and win; even if she did not always employ the most genteel means, at least she did not lie down and die." - Edward Wagenknecht 1952 Preface
"The novel 'Gone with the Wind' shaped the South I grew up in more than any other book....Few white Southerners, even today, can read this book without conjuring up a complex, tortured dreamscape of the South handed down by generations of relatives who grew up with the taste of defeat, like the bluing of gunmetal, still in their mouths. What Margaret Mitchell caught so perfectly was the sense of irredeemable loss and of a backwater Camelot corrupted by the mannerless intrusions of insensate invaders." - Pat Conroy |
