McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania In the following essay, she analyzes Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind as an anti-Civil War novel at odds with its wider cultural interpretation.

Gone with the Wind has sold an average of 500,000 copies each year since Its publication in 1936. More Americans learn about the Civil War from Mitchell's novel than from any other single author, and even more Americans know the book through the movie that followed three years after its publication. David O. Selznick's 1939 film is still the most viewed movie in the history of cinema. Gone with the Wind holds an indelible place is U.S. culture as the great romanticization of the last days of the antebellum South.

Within this cultural enshrinement, Scarlett's character is collapsed into a broader understanding of Southern culture, becoming both metaphor and metonym of the South Itself-the iconographic...