The American Civil War is the backdrop for Margaret Mitchell's panoramic lament for the lost glories of the American South and the story of headstrong beauty Scarlett O'Hara and her turbulent relationship with two men. When the book opens, just before the outbreak of hostilities, Scarlett is a spoilt teenage belle living on her family plantation, Tara, in Georgia. She is infatuated with the handsome son of a neighboring plantation owner, Ashley Wilkes, but he marries another young woman, Melanie Hamilton. On the rebound, Scarlett weds Melanie's brother but she soon loses him to the war that has now begun and he dies in an outbreak of measles. As the war continues, her life becomes a struggle to survive and to retain and rebuild Tara, which is destroyed by the Yankee army. To achieve this goal she is prepared to do almost anything, from murdering a thief who threatens the plantation to marrying for the money to keep the place going. When the war finally ends, Scarlett renews her relationship with Rhett Butler, a caddish charmer whom she first met in the pre-war years and who helped her and Melanie escape the burning town of Atlanta during the fighting. When her second husband dies, she marries Rhett, who has long admired her feisty vitality, but happiness still eludes her. A huge bestseller when it first appeared (it still is) and the basis of one of the most famous of all Hollywood movies, Gone with the Wind was the only novel Mitchell published in her lifetime. (The manuscript of a short novel she wrote as a teenager was eventually discovered and published in the 1990s.) Few books have the sweeping power of this epic romance of ordinary lives caught up in the great events of history.

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