Writing in the second edition (1940) of his monumental and influential study The American Novel, Carl van Doren wrote: “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind not only gave a revised version of the Civil War in the South, so often the subject of more conventional novels, but also told, with remarkable verve and narrative energy, the story of Scarlett O’Hara’s rise from desolate circumstances in which the war had left her and her Georgia community.”