"Plantations are no good if a woman doesn't have the man she wants..."
In the spring of 1861, sixteen-year-old Scarlett O'Hara is a sight to behold even in South Georgia, whose mociples look askance at Yankee reforms. Pampered plantation girl Tara always has her way - just not the well-read Ashley, who has already given the floor to Melanie. When the young man politely rejects her, neither Scarlett's sulking marriage to another nor her exemplary bulldog persistence will help the offended Scarlett. Moreover, her disgrace was unwittingly witnessed by a guy of the same dough: Rhett Butler, a solitary, brash adventurer unacceptable to the local gentry, whose predatory methods the heroine would like to explore more. And so fate will viciously favour them. A Confederate-Union war breaks out, the women in the bleeding rear are expected to have the same courage as the men in the field, and the two stubborn men dig themselves in deeper than they want to. American literature's most striking love epic, under the pressure of frontline events, soon becomes a coming-of-age novel in which the dramatic vicissitudes of Scarlett's relationship with Rhett also show the way the South can be healed of self-love. Out of the intoxicating self-love doomed to a shrieking whirlwind, so that the selfish can finally learn to love others regardless of differences.
The first half of the prose that was awarded the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and is the best-selling work of fiction of all time. In its film adaptation (1939), Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable are on screen together. The film won a then-record eight Academy Awards.
