Gone With the Wind by Mitchell, Margaret - 1936

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938, 1936 Later printing. Signed by five members of the Gone with the Wind film cast on the front free endpaper: Vivian Leigh, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland, and William Bakewell. Original publisher's gray cloth, lettered in teal; later printing dust jacket lettered in brown with illustration of Scarlett and her suitors to front panel. Very good with light fading to edges of cloth, touch of spotting to spine joints, and some toning to edges of front and rear pastedowns; good or better unclipped dust jacket with some chipping to front panel and spine ends (chip to top of front panel slightly affects The New York Times blurb), spine slightly faded, light spotting to rear panel, a few small closed tears to rear panel, front panel illustration bright and unfaded. Overall, a very nice copy, clean internally, and very rare as signed by the film cast. Gone with the Wind won Margaret Mitchell both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Perhaps best described as a work of historical fiction, Gone with the Wind also has many of the trappings of a traditional bildungsroman and romance novel, although critics argue that it does not fully fall under the category of either genre. The novel tells of archetypal Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara as she grows from a young woman into maturity against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Like many of the early 20th century Southern writers, Mitchell portrays an idyllic image of the antebellum South. While it can be legitimately criticized for its insensitivity to the treatment of African Americans who were enslaved, Mitchell's novel demonstrates how the South was decimated by the Civil War and continued to suffer under the Northern-sanctioned Restoration. Also the basis of the 1939 Academy Award-winning movie, the conflicted love story of rebellious Scarlett and Rhett Butler remains an American classic. This copy of Gone with the Wind is signed by five members of the cast of the 1939 film, four of which were the top-billed actors and actresses. For their performances, Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel won Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively. McDaniel’s win was a watershed moment in the history of Hollywood, as she became the first African American to receive an Oscar. Clark Gable and Olivia de Havilland were two of the greatest film stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, with Gable starring in films like The Misfits and It Happened One Night, and de Havilland starring opposite Errol Flynn in eight films, including the classics Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Dust Jacket Included.