Some pundits were surprised to see Gone With the Wind ranked fourth in the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American-made movies. Perhaps that's because they've never seen the picture, or read the book.
How many writers are clacking away at their keyboards right now, hoping to produce the definitive great American novel? We hate to disappoint all those ambitious authors, but we're afraid they're going to have to set their sights a little lower, because the fact is that the great American novel has already been written. In fact, it was written over sixty years ago, by a Southern journalist born and bred in Atlanta, a woman who had never written a novel before, and never wrote another.
Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind IS the great American novel, and would undoubtedly be acknowledged as such, were it not so thoroughly American. Though routinely dismissed as a melodrama by sneering dilettantes -- who either have not read the book or find themselves unable or unwilling to address the distinctively American events and issues it records -- Gone With the Wind is most definitely not a melodrama. It is an historical novel, in the manner of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and it is equal, if not superior, to both.
It is not only an historical novel, but a prophetic one as well, for Mrs. Mitchell's succinct recording of the barbarism visited upon the South eerily foreshadows the Reconstruction planned for America as a whole by the gurus of global governance. "The commandants of the Yankee troops in the various cities had complete power," Mitchell wrote, "even the power of life and death, over the civilian population, and they used that power. They could and did imprison citizens for any cause, or no cause, seize their property, hang them. They could and did harass and hamstring them with conflicting regulations about the operation of their businesses, the wages they must pay their servants, what they should say in public and in private utterances and what they should write in newspapers. . . ."
Margaret Mitchell may not have set out to write the great American novel, but she certainly chose the essential historical backdrop for it. No event in American history so completely defines our nation and our people as does the Civil War; certainly no war since has done so. The God-given rights of the individual, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence; the sovereignty of the States and the people, as codified in our United States Constitution; the industrial, egalitarian, progressivist nature of the North; the agrarian, hierarchical, tradition-bound culture of the South; the cynical exploitation of the slavery issue by agitators seeking to consolidate political power; the love of land and family, the individual courage and determination that enabled a defeated people to preserve their heritage -- these and other quintessentially American themes are perfectly captured for the first, and perhaps the last, time in Margaret Mitchell's great American novel, Gone With the Wind.
