It’s one of the best-selling books ever bound between covers, but that’s not what makes Margaret Mitchell’s magnificent mint julep of a novel great. The ultimate, original sweeping historical romance, it follows high-spirited Scarlett O’Hara, roguish Rhett Butler and romantic, infinitely good-looking Ashley Wilkes as the world that nurtured them is swept away in the cataclysm of the Civil War. As quintessentially American as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is English, Gone with the Wind is a colossally readable romance novel — love stories do not come more triangular—but it’s also the definitive telling of one of the basic American mythologies: the passing away, in blood and ashes, of the grand old South.
All-TIME 100 Novels
Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME.
Gone With the Wind
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Making the List
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King’s Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
F - G
H - I
L - N
O - R
S - T
U - W
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