The Enduring Question at the Heart of Gone with the Wind
Sadhika Pant revisits the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a book recently targeted for cancellation by certain activists. Pant suggests that Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes represent two dueling approaches to living, and this dichotomy invites nothing short of civilizational questions.
Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind is many things: a sweeping historical romance, a portrait of the American South that many consider controversial, and a narrative often entangled in debates about nostalgia, race, and ideology. These conversations, though important, have often obscured a subtler philosophical current. For all its romance and war-drum thunder, the novel remembers something many of us would rather forget: That surviving is not the same as living, and living is not always a virtue when the corn will not grow.
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
