Miss Margaret Mitchell's thousand-page novel of Civil War and Reconstruction days in the South is an interesting and entertaining accomplishment. The reviewer cannot call it the best novel yet written on the Civil War because he remembers. "The Red Badge of Courage" and Evelyn Scott's "The Wave," "Gone With the Wind" is not a "deep" book; its value lies in the scope of its narrative and in its extraordinary fine re-creation of an atmosphere. Despite that it is set in times of great historic significance it is a book of persons rather than of events.

Characters

But the persons are extremely well handled and the chronicle of their lives forms an attractive and decidedly first-class novel. Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine, is a triumph of characterization; shrewd, courageous, amoral, she flaunts her personal rebellion in the face of a rebellion shaken land. Half-Irish and half-French, utter realist yet the servant of a self-deceiving love, Scarlett O'Hara is unique in American fiction. Other characters are good and bad; the minor figures are not sketched with that conciseness and surety which mark the mature artist. Miss Mitchell needs space to develop either a character or a bit of action, and she very wisely, I think, does not hesitate to take that space where it is important. Rhelt Butler is one on whom she lavishes enough care to make him live. A cynicvillain who is undeluded by the sanctity for the Southern cause, he looks after his own welfare by running the blockade for high stakes. There are foils for these two in Mclanie and Ashley Wilkes and in a good many other Southern idealists, and there are hosts of incidental officers, carpetbaggers, Negroes, and all, to serve as background.

Best Seller

For a first novel Miss Mitchell's is an astonishing four de force. It is easy to believe that she spent seven years in writing it. It was born to be a beat-seller and no one but could be glad that it is. Tremendonaly long, dealing with the period of our greatest national crisis, written moreover from the losing (and of action and skillful characterisation, it is an experience that the American reader would be foolish to disregard.