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Gone with the Wind  By  cover art

Gone with the Wind

By: Margaret Mitchell
Narrated by: Linda Stephens
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Publisher's summary

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell's great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold.

Here are the characters that have become symbols of passion and desire: darkly handsome Rhett Butler and flirtatious Scarlett O'Hara. Behind them stand their gentler counterparts: Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton. As the lives and affairs of these absorbing characters play out against the tumult of the Civil War, Gone With the Wind reaches dramatic heights that have swept generations of fans off their feet.

Having lived in Atlanta for many years, narrator Linda Stephens has an authentic ear for the dialects of that region. Get ready to hear Gone With the Wind exactly as it was written: every word beautifully captured in a spectacular unabridged audio production.

©1964 Stephens Mitchell (P)2001 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best." ( The New York Times)
"The best novel to have ever come out of the South...it is unsurpassed in the whole of American writing." ( The Washington Post)

Featured Article: The Best Historical Fiction Audiobooks


Often based on real people, events, and scenarios, historical fiction gives us the opportunity to learn about worlds and times we will never experience while introducing fascinating characters and stories set in their midst. Sometimes, the genre can even give us a peek into hidden storylines that routinely go unmentioned in traditional history books, showing us that those of ages past are perhaps not so different from ourselves.

What listeners say about Gone with the Wind

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

not to miss audible experience

GWTW has been a favourite read of mine since my teen years, but I never realized before how much of the descriptions I tend to skip over in favour of dialogue. Listening to this book has made me hear every word and added a whole new dimension to the story. I thought the narrator was brilliant and the accents added an authenticity - its made me want to study more about the civil war.

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172 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Got the Accents Right

Okay, I'm not going to review the text of GWTW. It's been analyzed plenty. It's a brilliant book. 'Nuff said.

What I do want to review is the audio performance. When I saw that GWTW was available in audio format, I was dubious. I'm from the South. (Not the deep South -- Virginia). I speak with a Tidewater accent, which is different to my ear from a Georgia accent, which is different to my ear from a Charleston accent... You get the picture.

Ms. Stephens managed to get the nuances of the various accents well enough not to make me cringe. It sounds like a trivial thing, but since Mitchell, herself, made a big deal of differences of dialect in the actual novel, you need to have it in the performance. I'm so glad that the narrator did not go for that Eastern Tennessee accent that is so often touted as "Generic Southern".

If you love GWTW, get it. If you've never read it, this is a good way to enjoy the book.

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171 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Fabulous!

I won't comment on the novel Gone With the Wind, because nothing I can say would do this great classic justice. I will say that Linda Stephens is perhaps the best audiobook narrator I have ever had the pleasure of listening to! She is utterly fantastic.

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146 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Spectacular

I was reluctant to listen to this book because I thought it would be just a boring re-do of the great movie.

However, I think this book is spectacular. I have a personal rating system like Jacob's ladder. This is a five star book above the ordinary five stars. The narration is as good as the book and is what carried me along for several days straight, to the extent I neglected important personal duties...

Besides being a great love story with admirable characters, I learned more history in this book than I thought possible for a single volume. The author captured life in the South during, before and after the Civil War.

Gone With the Wind has been compared to War and Peace. I have listened to them both, and I say War and Peace was a duty to be fulfilled, and that Gone With the Wind an exciting pleasure and a true education, if you want it.

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140 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Epic, timeless, wonderful, also really racist

I kind of don't want to give this book 5 stars. I'm going to, because it was epic. Seriously, it's a really, really good read and Margaret Mitchell is a really, really good writer. She captures the feel of a generation that is lost and a bygone world and makes it real, pulsing with life and bittersweet memory and pride. Her characters are wonderfully vivid and complicated and conflicted, larger than life archetypes symbolizing the different elements of society each one represents. And the story is sweeping and grand. If you've seen the movie and thought it was gorgeous and epic, Hollywood only barely did justice to the source material. Gone With the Wind is deservedly one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written.

But... there is a really big "but" here:


"Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles. The vote must be given to them but it must be denied to most of their former owners."


There are a few things that Hollywood rather prudently left out in the cinematic version, and one of them is the fact that every white male character joins the Klan to oppose Yankees and freedmen in the period of Reconstruction following the war. And this is described in approbatory terms by the narrative viewpoint. Indeed, throughout the book, Mitchell compares African-Americans to monkeys, apes, and children, describes slavery as a generally benevolent institution in which kind slave owners took care of their "darkies," and when the slaves are freed, society crumbles because black people are destructive children who can't function without white people telling them what to do. Reconstruction (in which the South learns that yes, you really aren't allowed to own slaves anymore and yes, you really did actually lose the war) is a horror beyond enduring, but we're meant to mourn the lost world of balls and barbecues attended by rich white plantation owners and their loyal, happy slaves.

Now, you may be saying, "Well, sure, the characters are racist, of course former Confederates are going to be racist." And that's true, I wouldn't have a problem with the characters being racist and flinging the n-word about. That's just historically accurate. But the authorial viewpoint makes it very clear that Margaret Mitchell shared the POV of her characters. Everything about the antebellum South (except its sexism, which is treated with satirical amusement and thoroughly lampooned by Scarlett in everything she does) is glorified and painted in a rosy hue. All sympathy is with rich white Southerners when Reconstruction destroys their world. Their former slaves? The author takes pains to describe how much happier and better off most of them were before being freed. Black characters are all offensive racial stereotypes who are constantly described (not by other characters, but in the narrative POV) as apes, monkeys, and children.

I don't think you have to be overly "politically correct" to find Gone With the Wind to be a hard book to get through at times, with really glaring evidence of the author's Southern sympathies and unquestioned racism.

And yet I'm giving it 5 stars. I suppose in the interests of political correctness I should knock off at least a star, but I have to be honest: I was just enthralled by this long, long novel from start to finish. Even while I was sometimes gritting my teeth at the racist descriptions and all the "Wah, wah, poor plantation owners, the Yankees took away all their slaves, life is so hard for them now!" I wanted the story to keep going and going. I wasn't bored for one moment.

The protagonists, of course, are what make this a timeless love story. Note that's "love story," not "romance," because there's very little romantic about Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. Scarlett is an evil, conniving drama queen who if she had been raised in a society where women were actually allowed to do things would rule the world, but since she wasn't, she just learned to wrap the world around her finger and tell it to go to hell. She is absolutely the most self-centered character you will ever meet: in her mind, she is literally the center of the world. She sees nothing, understands nothing, and cares about nothing that isn't of direct and immediate importance to herself. And yet within her narrow, blindered view of the world, she's brilliant and adaptive and resourceful and unstoppable. The destruction of that glittering world of ball gowns and parties and negroes waiting on her hand and foot, in which she was raised to expect the world to revolve around her, is harrowingly depicted in her trials during the war and after it, and in her downright heroic accomplishments keeping not only herself but her extended family alive. Never mind that she never actually cares about anyone but herself, she does what has to be done, which is largely why her sister-in-law, poor Melanie Wilkes, believes until her dying day that Scarlett is a wonderful, noble, loving sister, even while the entire time Scarlett was hating her and coveting Melanie's husband Ashley.

Then there is Rhett Butler. The most brilliant Byronic rogue ever. Rhett kicks Heathcliff and Rochester's prissy white English arses and ascends to the top of the literary man-mountain as a first class scoundrel and anti-hero with a dark, brooding swoon-worthy heart. Because he's ruthlessly pragmatic and mercenary, smart enough to know right from the start that the South has started a fight it can't win, and he makes millions as a "speculator," enduring the wrath and hatred of his peers and gleefully, smugly giving them the finger, and yet in the end he goes off to be a hero. And survives, and becomes a (very, very rich) scoundrel again, and his reputation keeps going up and down throughout the book. He is the only man who is a match for Scarlett, because as he points out, they are so much alike. Like Scarlett, he's awesome and caddish and hateful and the best character ever.

Scarlett and Rhett's relationship is so much more tempestuous, conflicted, and compelling than in the movie. Every time they are together, it's like watching two grandmasters drawing knives and sparring. They were truly made for each other, they deserve each other, they could be happy together, and yet how could it end in anything but tears?

Oh yeah, I loved this book. Parts of it are so offensive, it will not bear scrutiny to modern sensibilities (it was pretty darn offensive when it was written, even if they did make a toned-down Hollywood movie based on it a few years later), and if you can't stand reading Mark Twain and all his uses of the n-word, then Gone With the Wind will probably make you want to throw the book against a wall (which will make a big dent, because this is a big book). But it is powerful and moving, the drama is grander than any epic fantasy doorstopper, the romance is hotter than anything I've ever read (I am not a romance fan and I don't usually describe romances as "hot," okay?), and the characters are fabulous and melodramatic and you care about every one of them, even (especially) the African-American characters, despite Mitchell's offensive treatment of them.

This is certainly not the only "problematic" book I've ever enjoyed, but never have I so enjoyed so problematic a book. If it weren't so damned racist, I'd give Gone With the Wind my highest recommendation. If it weren't so damned good, I could castigate it as a well-written but really offensive book whose author misused her gifts. But it's both, so I recommend it, but my recommendation comes with a big fat warning label.

Linda Stephens, as the narrator, truly does this book justice. For a book full of Southern characters with different regional accents, and with such strong characters of different races and genders, good narration is critical, and Stephens does a wonderful job, even with the flat, nasal Yankee accents. Her Scarlett and Rhett now sound more to me like the "real" ones than Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Absolutely a top-notch reading. So if you're looking for a long, long book to engage your attention for many hours, you can't go wrong here (keeping all the above caveats in mind).

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128 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Linda Stephens is an Incredible Reader

I agree with another reviewer that this was one of the best credits I've ever spent, largely due to the excellent performance of the reader. Consistent and distinct characterizations were the highlight of this reading--I was actually brought to tears several times. I will listen to this audiobook over and over again, I'm sure.

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54 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

The Template for All Future Historical Romances

Where does Gone with the Wind rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

In the top ten percent.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Mammy. Hands Down. I liked her, because she showed so much love and compassion for the family for whom she worked -- generation after generation -- despite all their foibles, and despite the fact that she was, technically, a slave to them.

What does Linda Stephens bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

EVERYTHING. I don't think that I would have had the patience to read "Gone with the Wind" in print. Linda Stephens not only made this romance novel tolerable, she brought it to life. I would like to listen to more audiobooks narrated by Linda Stephens.

Who was the most memorable character of Gone with the Wind and why?

Mammy, again. She held the O'Hara family together. She saw to everyone's needs, and kept everyone in line.

Any additional comments?

"Gone with the Wind" definitely deserves its classic status. Even though I generally have no interest in romance novels, I listened to this one with rapt attention almost all the way through. At the end, it degenerates a bit into bodice-ripper territory; but, otherwise, Margaret Mitchell has left us a magnificent story, well-told. I most value her presentation of the Civil War from the South's point of view. All history should be taught in this way: through stories of the people who lived it. Mitchell shows us the OTHER side of the story -- particularly the War's effects on the black people. She shows us how Emancipation was initiated too fast, how the black people -- formerly enslaved, told what to do, and (ideally) looked after by their white masters -- were suddenly thrown into society with no education and no preparation. I never would have believed it before I listened to "Gone with the Wind," but Mitchell actually describes the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in a sympathetic way. If you have seen the movie, you will probably be envisioning Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, because he epitomized the part. Scarlett O'Hara annoyed me no end; but it speaks to Mitchell's skill that she made us care about Scarlett, despite her spoiled, shallow silliness. I recommend this audiobook to just about everyone ... even if you don't like romances, and even if you don't like history.

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48 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Always a Great Read; Good Dialect

Having been born an umpteenth generational Georgian, I have been a fan of GWTW since my first encounter with the movie at age fourteen. Of course I have read the novel, but wanted to add this audiobook to my collection of all things GWTW. I did however, hold my breath about hearing someone's idea of what Southeners are supposed to sound like. You would be surprised at how often it is done so tooth-grating awful a real Southener can't stand to listen, and there are some movies I just can't watch due to the butchering of our dialect. Linda Stephens not only got it right, but did a good job with the dozens of voices. Must have been quite a chore to get through the entire tome, but she did it well and never failed or sounded bored. It was a joy to listen to.

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46 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent Book

I had read the book a few times and have seen the movie, so I already knew I liked the story. This narrator does a fantastic job. The book is rather racist and rather sexist (at least with some of the views of women), but consider when it was written and the period in which it was placed. If it was politically correct it likely wouldn't feel as real. It is funny that such unlikable charactors can be so very interesting. It is a shame she only wrote the one book as she is really a great author. I highly recommend the book, don't be afraid of the length, long books are great if well written, and this one is very well written. She could have tacked another 40 hours to the end of it and I wouldn't have minded at all.

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44 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

what a surprise

I have read the book, seen the movie many times, but this was by far the most enjoyable GWTW experience. I heard things I missed or forgot in the read and that were totally not part of the film. For any fan of Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece - the Audio version is a must do!

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41 people found this helpful