What is Gone With the Wind about?
A willful Georgia plantation daughter spends the Civil War and Reconstruction chasing a man who doesn't want her, married three times over, while the one man who actually loves her runs out of patience right as she finally realizes it. This Gone With the Wind summary follows Scarlett O'Hara through Margaret Mitchell's only novel published in her lifetime, released June 30, 1936 by Macmillan. Mitchell spent roughly a decade writing it — famously drafting the last chapter first — and won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for it. It remains one of the best-selling novels ever written, and one of the most contested: it's a genuinely great piece of Depression-era American storytelling and, as historians and critics have extensively documented, a vehicle for a deeply romanticized, false picture of slavery and the antebellum South.
What genre is Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell?
Gone With the Wind is historical fiction set from 1861 through the mid-1870s, and it belongs to what scholars call "plantation fiction" — novels written from the perspective and values of the slaveholding class, largely in reaction against Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. This isn't a fringe reading: historian David W. Blight has directly linked Scarlett's "indomitable spirit" to the reconciliationist "Lost Cause" mythology that framed the antebellum South as a noble civilization destroyed by an unjust war, and the novel itself calls the Ku Klux Klan "a tragic necessity" in its own narrative voice, not just a character's opinion. In 2020, HBO Max temporarily pulled the 1939 film after screenwriter John Ridley's op-ed argued it "romanticizes the horrors of slavery," returning it with a contextualizing introduction from film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Readers who want the same setting examined with real moral clarity about race should read To Kill a Mockingbird, and anyone curious about the book Mitchell was writing against should read Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Did Margaret Mitchell really write the ending first?
Gone With the Wind summary
This Gone With the Wind summary opens in April 1861. Sixteen-year-old Scarlett O'Hara, daughter of Irish immigrant plantation owner Gerald O'Hara, is devastated to learn Ashley Wilkes, the man she loves, is engaged to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. At a barbecue at the Wilkes plantation, she confesses her feelings to Ashley; he says he cares for her only as a friend. Rhett Butler, a disreputable outsider, overhears the whole exchange. Out of spite, Scarlett marries Melanie's brother Charles Hamilton, who dies of measles two months into the war, leaving her a widow with a son.
Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with Melanie, where she keeps running into Rhett, now a wealthy Confederate blockade runner openly cynical about the war's prospects. By September 1864, Atlanta is under siege; Melanie goes into labor as the city burns, and Scarlett delivers the baby with only a terrified enslaved girl, Prissy, for help. Rhett drives them partway out of the city before abandoning Scarlett to join the retreating Confederate army. She makes it back to Tara alone, finding it devastated — her mother dead of typhoid, her father broken by grief, the fields stripped bare. Standing amid the ruined land, she vows: "As God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again."
Facing crushing Reconstruction-era taxes on Tara, Scarlett tricks her sister's fiancé, shopkeeper Frank Kennedy, into marrying her instead, then takes over his store and buys a sawmill, running it with leased convict labor — a real and genuinely scandalous Reconstruction practice the novel uses to mark just how far Scarlett is willing to go. Frank is killed during a Ku Klux Klan raid avenging an earlier attack on Scarlett; the book identifies this explicitly as the Klan, framing it sympathetically as men protecting order, a detail the 1939 film later sanitized into a vague, unnamed vigilante raid. Rhett proposes at Frank's funeral, and Scarlett accepts.
How does Gone With the Wind end?
Scarlett and Rhett marry and have a daughter, Bonnie Blue, whom Rhett adores. But the marriage sours: Scarlett stays emotionally fixated on Ashley, and after a violent confrontation with Rhett she becomes pregnant again, then miscarries after a fall down the stairs during another argument. Bonnie later dies falling from a pony while jumping a fence her father had let her attempt. Grief devastates them both. Melanie, pregnant again, dies from complications — and at her deathbed, Scarlett finally realizes she never truly loved Ashley, and that she loves Rhett. It's too late. Exhausted by years of being rejected for Ashley, Rhett tells her his love for her has died and that he's leaving.
When Scarlett asks what she's supposed to do, the novel's actual line — worth stating precisely, since it's almost always misquoted — is simply: "My dear, I don't give a damn." The word "Frankly" was added by screenwriter Sidney Howard for the 1939 film and never appears in Mitchell's text. Shattered but characteristically resilient, Scarlett resolves to return to Tara to recover her strength and find some way to win Rhett back, telling herself: "After all, tomorrow is another day." The novel ends there, deliberately unresolved — Mitchell never confirmed whether Scarlett succeeds.
Who are the main characters in Gone With the Wind?
Scarlett O'Hara: The novel's willful, vain, endlessly resourceful protagonist, driven by survival instinct and an obsessive infatuation with Ashley Wilkes. She marries three times and becomes a ruthless Reconstruction-era businesswoman, only realizing her true feelings for Rhett once he's already leaving.
Rhett Butler: A wealthy, cynical, socially disgraced blockade runner who sees through Southern society's illusions from the start. He pursues Scarlett for years, marries her, and finally leaves after their daughter's death and Melanie's death exhaust his patience.
Ashley Wilkes: A refined, bookish planter's son Scarlett idolizes throughout the novel. He marries Melanie out of a sense that "like must marry like," fights loyally for the Confederacy despite private doubts, and returns from war passive and unable to adapt.
Melanie Hamilton: Ashley's gentle, quietly strong-willed wife, who remains loyal to and defends Scarlett throughout the novel despite Scarlett's secret contempt for her; her death from a miscarriage precipitates the novel's climax.
Mammy: The formidable enslaved, then formerly enslaved, woman who nursed Scarlett's mother and then Scarlett herself. Fiercely loyal, outspoken, and moralistic — the novel frames her as choosing to remain at Tara after emancipation, one of several depictions of Black characters that scholars have extensively documented as racial stereotyping.
Gerald O'Hara: Scarlett's hard-drinking, self-made Irish immigrant father, who won Tara in a card game and descends into grief-stricken dementia after his wife's death.
Best quotes from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The most quoted lines from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, checked against the original text:
"My dear, I don't give a damn." — Rhett Butler (the novel's actual wording; the film's famous "Frankly, my dear..." adds a word Mitchell never wrote)
"After all, tomorrow is another day!" — Scarlett O'Hara
"As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's all over, I'm never going to be hungry again... As God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again." — Scarlett O'Hara, at Tara
"Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is."
"You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip." — Rhett Butler, to Scarlett
"I've always had a weakness for lost causes once they're really lost." — Rhett Butler
The first two are the novel's most famous lines, spoken at the very end.
Frequently asked questions
Does Rhett leave Scarlett for good in Gone With the Wind?
The novel never says. It ends with Rhett walking out and Scarlett resolving to win him back "tomorrow"; whether she actually succeeds is left genuinely unresolved in Mitchell's text, and she refused for the rest of her life to write a sequel confirming it.
What does Rhett actually say at the end — is it "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"?
Not in the book. The novel's line is simply "My dear, I don't give a damn." Screenwriter Sidney Howard added "Frankly" for the 1939 film, and that version is now what most people remember — but it isn't Mitchell's original wording.
Is Gone With the Wind based on a true story?
No — it's historical fiction with invented characters and a fictional plantation, Tara, set against real events (the Civil War, the Atlanta campaign, Reconstruction) that Mitchell researched extensively. She said herself, "I made Tara up, just as I made up every character in the book. But nobody will believe me."
Why is Gone With the Wind controversial?
Because of its romanticized "Lost Cause" portrayal of the antebellum slaveholding South, its stereotyping of Black characters as either docile, loyal servants or menacing freedmen, and its sympathetic framing of Ku Klux Klan violence during Reconstruction as a "tragic necessity" — a description that appears in Mitchell's own narrative voice, not just a character's opinion. Historians including David W. Blight have written extensively about the novel's role in shaping a false popular memory of slavery and Reconstruction.
Is there a sequel to Gone With the Wind?
Yes. Mitchell's estate authorized Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett (1991), later a 1994 TV miniseries, plus Donald McCaig's Rhett Butler's People (2007) and the Mammy-focused prequel Ruth's Journey (2014). None were written by Mitchell herself, who died in 1949.
What age is Gone With the Wind appropriate for?
It's generally treated as adult or mature-YA reading, typically approached from around age fourteen or fifteen and up, given its length, war violence, an ambiguous marital rape scene, and racial slurs used throughout the text. Most contemporary discussion of the book recommends pairing it with historical context about its Lost Cause framing rather than reading it uncritically.
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