Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn

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Publishers Weekly called it ‘very possibly the greatest American novel.’ The Washington Post declared that it was the ‘best novel to have ever come out of the South...it is unsurpassed in the whole of American writing.’ It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was turned into an iconic, Academy Award-winning movie. Are we talking about ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’? Something by Mark Twain? Carson McCullers? William Faulkner? No, this is a different Southern novel--Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone With the Wind.’

I’ve never gotten the whole ‘Gone With the Wind’ thing. The book is, frankly, turgid, and I can’t sit through the film. But as a lead-in, of sorts, to the November publication of Donald McCaig’s novel ‘Rhett Butler’s People,’ Scribner has reissued ‘Gone With the Wind’ (960 pp., $17 paper) with a preface in which novelist Pat Conroy (‘The Prince of Tides,’ ‘The Great Santini’) suggests it ‘shaped the South I grew up in more than any other book.’

I’m willing to give Conroy the benefit of the doubt on this one; who can say what makes a book a social force? What I don’t understand, however, is why we need another novel about Rhett and Scarlett when the original still has such a resonance. St. Martin’s Press, which will publish ‘Rhett Butler’s People,’ paid the Mitchell estate $4.5 million just for the right to do a sequel--and it’s not even the first sequel at that. (Alexandra Ripley’s ‘Scarlett’ was a bestseller in 1991.)

But then, the ‘Gone With the Wind’ saga has long since ceased to be about storytelling and become a tale of commerce instead. With ‘Rhett Butler’s People,’ and a ‘Gone With the Wind’ musical set to open next year in London’s West End, perhaps Scarlett was right when she declares at the end of Mitchell’s novel: ‘[T]omorrow is another day.’

David L. Ulin