For any young person “growing up southern” in the thirties, Gone with the Wind, the massive novel itself, had an impact far beyond its literary merits. It climaxed a decade of Southern historical novels, beginning with Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and going on with Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, Clifford Dowdy’s Bugles Blow No More, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Allen Tate’s The Fathers, and so on.

My classmates at the then small women’s college of the University of North Carolina read it and talked to grandmothers and great-grandmothers who had lived through “Mr. Sherman’s visits” and as youngsters saw his “calling cards,” the blackened chimneys still standing along the six hundred miles of Sherman’s track.

And over at tiny Atlantic Christian College in eastern North Carolina, Gone with the Wind was the only novel Ava Gardner ever read until she went to Hollywood and got “educated.”

Gone with the Wind meant that “we” had won. We could begin to rejoin the Union, a process that took thirty years, and that we could even enter the twentieth century. This is probably why I married a man born in 1899 and raised by two grandfathers who took part in the war. For him the “nasty business” at Cold Harbor was as real as the Tet Offensive. My own hero grandfather was a Union officer, but most of my kin was Southern and Confederate.

The universality of the book, as the country took first the novel, then the film to its heart, was attested to by a New England friend who said that even in school she had never really learned of the invasion and occupation of the South and its devastation until she had read and then reread Gone with the Wind . Ironically, my staunchly Yankee husband said the very night before he was stricken, “I thought I married Melanie, but perhaps I married Scarlett.” I said, “In every Southern woman there is a little of both.”

Because of its widespread appeal, Gone with the Wind actually helped make us one country again. For me that is the ultimate importance.

—Margaret Coit Elwell, author, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait

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No contest. Gone With the Wind, hands down. It was considered practically a religious document when I was growing up in Atlanta. And for a grubby little schoolboy, all that passion and bravery and adventure were electric! My own hometown! I decided then and there to live my life on a similarly grand scale. I haven’t done it so far, but God bless Margaret Mitchell for putting such ideas in my head.

—Alfred Uhry, playwright, author, Driving Miss Daisy

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Without question, my favorite American (or other) historical novel is, and will always be, Gone with the