Tag Archives: novel

Gone With the Wind & the Books That Shaped America

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Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War-era novel Gone With the Wind was published on this day in 1936. The only one of her works to be published in her lifetime, the book was an instant success, earning Mitchell critical recognition and remaining a national bestseller for two years.

Much to our delight, Gone With the Wind is also included in a new exhibition that opened on June 25 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is called “Books That Shaped America,” and it aims to

spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives . . . Some of the titles on display have been the source of great controversy, even derision, in U.S. history. Nevertheless, they shaped Americans’ views of the world and the world’s views of America.

Here’s what the Library of Congress has to say about Gone With the Wind:

The most popular romance novel of all time was the basis for the most popular movie of all time (in today’s dollars). Margaret Mitchell’s book, set in the South during the Civil War, won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and it remains popular, despite charges that its author had a blind eye regarding the horrors of slavery.

Looking more closely at the exhibition’s list of books, we are very pleased to see many whose authors have appeared on U.S. postage stamps, including three (!) authors from the 2012 stamp program: poets Gwendolyn Brooks and William Carlos Williams, and Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. From the exhibition website:

  • Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

“A Street in Bronzeville” was Brooks’s first book of poetry. It details, in stark terms, the oppression of blacks in a Chicago neighborhood. Critics hailed the book, and in 1950 Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was also appointed as U.S. Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 1985.

  • William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923)

A practicing physician for more than 40 years, William Carlos Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the “Imagist” movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme.

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)

“Tarzan of the Apes” is the first in a series of books about the popular man who was raised by and lived among the apes. With its universal themes of honesty, heroism and bravery, the series has never lost popularity. Countless Tarzan adaptations have been filmed for television and the silver screen, including an animated version currently in production.

Mark Twain, whose stamp was issued in 2011, is also included in the exhibition. “Books That Shaped America” will be on view through September 29. The Gwendolyn Brooks and William Carlos Williams stamps were issued in April 2012 as part of the Twentieth-Century Poets stamps pane and are still available. The Edgar Rice Burroughs stamps will be issued on August 17, 2012, in Tarzana, California.

Anyone want to start a stamp subjects book club?!

Gone with the Wind TM, its characters and elements are trademarks of Turner Entertainment Company and the Stephens Mitchell Trusts.

Tarzan™ Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and Used by Permission.

National Book Month: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

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In the continuing celebration of National Book Month, we look at Ayn Rand, a writer and philosopher whose novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are still among the most read books of our time.

Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s last novel. Part mystery and part thriller, the plot seeks to answer the question posed at the beginning of the book: “Who is John Galt?” The answer is the story of a man who said he would “stop the motor of the world” and succeeded by luring away society’s most talented and capable minds. Passionate and profound, the story explores the main tenets of Objectivism, Rand’s philosophy of rational individualism.

While her philosophy is still influential today, what is little known about Rand is that she was a passionate stamp collector. In an article published in 1971—“Why I Like Stamp Collecting”—the author explained her fascination: “An inextricable part of even a casual glance at stamps is the awareness of what a magnificent achievement they represent: for a few pennies, you can send a letter to any place on earth, to the farthest, most desolate corner where human beings might live…Those bright little pieces of paper will carry your words across oceans, over mountains, over deserts, and still more difficult: over savage frontiers…”

Rand the stamp collector would have appreciated the honor granted her by the U.S. Postal Service in 1999: her own stamp. The design of the stamp, by artist Nick Gaetano, is an image of Rand’s face, set against the skyscrapers she celebrated in her novels as the embodiment of mankind’s heroic potential.

National Book Month: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling

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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was acclaimed for her novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction that vividly portrayed both the beauty of the Florida backwoods and the lives of the people who lived there. After publishing her first two novels—South Moon Under in 1933 and Golden Apples in 1935—Rawlings achieved major success with The Yearling.

Published in 1938, The Yearling tells the story of 12-year-old Jody Baxter, who lives with his parents in the Florida backwoods. When a rattlesnake bite prompts his father to shoot and kill a doe to save his own life, Jody adopts the doe’s fawn as a pet. The rambunctious fawn soon causes trouble at the farmstead, forcing the Baxters to make a difficult decision during uncertain times.

Published to rave reviews, The Yearling sold 240,000 copies during its first year in print and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. The New York Herald Tribune compared the book’s protagonist, Jody Baxter, to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and a Time magazine reviewer wrote that The Yearling stood “a good chance, when adults have finished with it, of finding a permanent place in adolescent libraries.”

In 2008 Rawlings was featured on the 24th stamp in the Literary Arts series. In the foreground of the stamp art is a portrait of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings based on an undated photograph. The background depicts a fawn at a watering hole in the Florida scrub country. The rows of spots on the fawn, which are consistent with descriptions in The Yearling, indicate that the fawn is a young male.